As everyone knows, one of my favorite things is postulating (after the manner of Balzac) categories that are so specific that they barely fit anything other than the single instance they are describing.
So, describing DANIEL DERONDA to Talya, I said, "It's one of those later works by an author that is still great, of course, because it is developing ideas that were already-present, but too ambitious to be purely enjoyable." And then the only other work I could think of to put in this category was ...And Justice for All, by Metallica.
[Yet another, still interesting, but broader, category would be: works obviously after an artist has peaked, but still worth having.]
Here's the one I'm working with today. Totally definitive generic works. The single most obvious example to demonstrate a genre. Not the "best," but maybe the least idiosyncratic while still rising above mediocrity. "Generic" therefore in the best sense. (Basically unambiguous.)
I encourage comments.
FILM----
Hollywood Western: Shane
Spaghetti Western: Big Gundown
Noir: Out of the Past (which I don't care for), or The Postman Always Rings Twice
MUSIC:
Grindcore: Terrorizer "World Downfall"
Youth Crew: Project X 7"
UK82: Partisans "Police Story"
Thrash Metal: Metallica "Kill Em All" or Megadeth "Peace Sells"
Country Rock: Byrds "Sweetheart of the Rodeo"
Glam: David Bowie "Ziggy Stardust"
NWOBHM: Diamond Head "Lightning to the Nations"
Goth: Sisters of Mercy "First and Last and Always"
British Invasion: I have a record in mind from a previous conversation but I can't remember what I think the answer to this one is.
Oi: Blitz, "Voice of a Generation"
Black Metal: Ulver, "Nattens Madrigal"
Shoegaze: My Bloody Valentine "Loveless"
name some more...
Books:
Tragedy: Oedipus Rex
Epic: The Aeneid
Romanticism: Tintern Abbey
Realist novel: Also couldn't think of one here. Something by Trollope maybe?
In a way, there shouldn't be "argument" about this, because the very premise is "We all agree that this is what XXXX genre is, therefore we should agree on its exemplification in YYYY work." But I haven't read/heard/seen everything; there might be a way more normative oi! album that "Voice of a Generation," for instance...
Friday, May 04, 2007
Wednesday, May 02, 2007
Reading on the Subway, con't.
Elm Rock City has a good post up right now about a topic near and dear to our hearts, and recently discussed (below): what makes people read or not read great books?
[Addition: in many of the comments to said post, there is what amounts to a disparaging of reading as something not special, something "untimely" and impractical. But if that is how one feels, you've already played your hand as to whether people should be reading classic literature. If it is something to do with calculation, efficiency, maximized returns on one's time, and immediate relevancy, literature will lose every time. It is only when literature takes us outside of that part of our lives which does not have time for it, that we learn to make time for it.]
I worked at a bookstore all through high school, and last year, and this is what people buy (in Texas, at least):
Still, I have to admit, in New York people *do* read more than anywhere else. Case in point: hipster folk band Effi Briest. In any other town, Rainer Maria (qua reference) is probably over people's heads...much less a novel by the mega obscure Theodor Fontane.
Eventually I am going to write something about philosophy and reading on my other blog, but I do believe that reading is (or can be/should be) thinking, and that there is no substitution for it, and that learning is not valuable despite the time it takes, but because of the time it takes: the inefficient, the inconvenient, are so for a reason--"consumption" is alien to the lasting qualities of these works. (Take Dickens for instance; the idea that Dickens is stuffy or hard or anything but pure entertainment would have been laughable a hundred years ago: that he has become so seems not co-incidental.)
I do not understand someone wanting to finish (be "done with") Proust, Milton, Sterne... don't you just want these things to keep going?
[Addition: in many of the comments to said post, there is what amounts to a disparaging of reading as something not special, something "untimely" and impractical. But if that is how one feels, you've already played your hand as to whether people should be reading classic literature. If it is something to do with calculation, efficiency, maximized returns on one's time, and immediate relevancy, literature will lose every time. It is only when literature takes us outside of that part of our lives which does not have time for it, that we learn to make time for it.]
I worked at a bookstore all through high school, and last year, and this is what people buy (in Texas, at least):
- self-help books
- Christian self-help books
- cookbooks and bargain books
- NY Times-approved things like READING LOLITA IN TEHRAN
- Harry Potter books
- THE LIFE OF PI, BEE SEASON, WHITE TEETH, etc.
Still, I have to admit, in New York people *do* read more than anywhere else. Case in point: hipster folk band Effi Briest. In any other town, Rainer Maria (qua reference) is probably over people's heads...much less a novel by the mega obscure Theodor Fontane.
Eventually I am going to write something about philosophy and reading on my other blog, but I do believe that reading is (or can be/should be) thinking, and that there is no substitution for it, and that learning is not valuable despite the time it takes, but because of the time it takes: the inefficient, the inconvenient, are so for a reason--"consumption" is alien to the lasting qualities of these works. (Take Dickens for instance; the idea that Dickens is stuffy or hard or anything but pure entertainment would have been laughable a hundred years ago: that he has become so seems not co-incidental.)
I do not understand someone wanting to finish (be "done with") Proust, Milton, Sterne... don't you just want these things to keep going?
Tuesday, May 01, 2007
Summer Reading List
Unlike most people, I read novels "for a living," so my summer reading has a lot of the critical/philosophical/psychoanalytic books that I don't get to read during the school year. The point of posting this is if anyone else is reading these things, get in touch and we can read them together. Particularly the Beckett novels and "The Wolf Man."
PICKWICK PAPERS (Dickens)
VANITY FAIR (Thackeray)
DANIEL DERONDA (Eliot)
WOMAN IN WHITE (Collins)
SODOM AND GOMORRAH (Proust)
BLUE AND BROWN BOOKS (Wittgenstein)
INTERPRETATION OF DREAMS (Freud)
FUNDAMENTALS OF LANGUAGE (Jakobson)
DECEIT DESIRE AND THE NOVEL (Girard)
FOUR FUNDAMENTALS OF PSYCHOANALYSIS (Lacan)
CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON (Kant)
DIALOGIC IMAGINATION (Bakhtin)
MARXISM AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF LANGUAGE (Bakhtin)
MOLLOY, MALONE DIES, THE UNNAMEABLE (Beckett)
THE WOLF MAN (Freud)
THE WOLF MAN'S MAGIC WORD (Torok, Abraham, Derrida)
PICKWICK PAPERS (Dickens)
VANITY FAIR (Thackeray)
DANIEL DERONDA (Eliot)
WOMAN IN WHITE (Collins)
SODOM AND GOMORRAH (Proust)
BLUE AND BROWN BOOKS (Wittgenstein)
INTERPRETATION OF DREAMS (Freud)
FUNDAMENTALS OF LANGUAGE (Jakobson)
DECEIT DESIRE AND THE NOVEL (Girard)
FOUR FUNDAMENTALS OF PSYCHOANALYSIS (Lacan)
CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON (Kant)
DIALOGIC IMAGINATION (Bakhtin)
MARXISM AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF LANGUAGE (Bakhtin)
MOLLOY, MALONE DIES, THE UNNAMEABLE (Beckett)
THE WOLF MAN (Freud)
THE WOLF MAN'S MAGIC WORD (Torok, Abraham, Derrida)
Monday, April 30, 2007
a demonstration
Here is something further on the point I was just making.
It's a poem by Tennyson, called "St. Simeon Stylites." It's about how ascetic and devoted this monk is, but (in true Lacanian fashion) he fails to give away the excess (of devotion, saintly ambition) of his desire, so he is circling around what *cannot* finally be renounced: renunciation.
But the real problem is that it is a dramatic monologue; ie: he is talking about himself, how "base" he is, and you'll see it just rubs you the wrong way. [Astute readers will make the connection to psychoanalysis' "talking cure"--we can't STOP "making meaning" about ourselves, even in our flattest justifications.]
Altho’ I be the basest of mankind,
From scalp to sole one slough and crust of sin,
Unfit for earth, unfit for heaven, scarce meet
For troops of devils, mad with blasphemy,
I will not cease to grasp the hope I hold
Of saintdom, and to clamour, mourn and sob,
Battering the gates of heaven with storms of prayer,
Have mercy, Lord, and take away my sin.
Let this avail, just, dreadful, mighty God,
This not be all in vain, that thrice ten years,
Thrice multiplied by superhuman pangs,
In hungers and in thirsts, fevers and cold,
In coughs, aches, stitches, ulcerous throes and cramps,
A sign betwixt the meadow and the cloud,
Patient on this tall pillar I have borne
Rain, wind, frost, heat, hail, damp, and sleet, and snow;
And I had hoped that ere this period closed
Thou wouldst have caught me up into thy rest,
Denying not these weather-beaten limbs
The meed of saints, the white robe and the palm.
O Lord, Lord,
Thou knowest I bore this better at the first,
For I was strong and hale of body then;
And tho’ my teeth, which now are dropt away,
Would chatter with the cold, and all my beard
Was tagg’d with icy fringes in the moon,
I drown’d the whoopings of the owl with sound
Of pious hymns and psalms, and sometimes saw
An angel stand and watch me, as I sang.
The silly people take me for a saint,
And bring me offerings of fruit and flowers:
And I, in truth (thou wilt bear witness here)
Have all in all endured as much, and more
Than many just and holy men, whose names
Are register’d and calendar’d for saints.
The end! the end!
Surely the end! What’s here? a shape, a shade,
A flash of light. Is that the angel there
That holds a crown? Come, blessed brother, come.
I know thy glittering face. I waited long;
My brows are ready. What! deny it now?
Nay, draw, draw, draw nigh. So I clutch it. Christ!
’Tis gone: ’tis here again; the crown! the crown!
So now ’tis fitted on and grows to me,
And from it melt the dews of Paradise,
Sweet! sweet! spikenard, and balm, and frankincense.
Ah! let me not be fool’d, sweet saints: I trust
That I am whole, and clean, and meet for Heaven.
It's a poem by Tennyson, called "St. Simeon Stylites." It's about how ascetic and devoted this monk is, but (in true Lacanian fashion) he fails to give away the excess (of devotion, saintly ambition) of his desire, so he is circling around what *cannot* finally be renounced: renunciation.
But the real problem is that it is a dramatic monologue; ie: he is talking about himself, how "base" he is, and you'll see it just rubs you the wrong way. [Astute readers will make the connection to psychoanalysis' "talking cure"--we can't STOP "making meaning" about ourselves, even in our flattest justifications.]
Altho’ I be the basest of mankind,
From scalp to sole one slough and crust of sin,
Unfit for earth, unfit for heaven, scarce meet
For troops of devils, mad with blasphemy,
I will not cease to grasp the hope I hold
Of saintdom, and to clamour, mourn and sob,
Battering the gates of heaven with storms of prayer,
Have mercy, Lord, and take away my sin.
Let this avail, just, dreadful, mighty God,
This not be all in vain, that thrice ten years,
Thrice multiplied by superhuman pangs,
In hungers and in thirsts, fevers and cold,
In coughs, aches, stitches, ulcerous throes and cramps,
A sign betwixt the meadow and the cloud,
Patient on this tall pillar I have borne
Rain, wind, frost, heat, hail, damp, and sleet, and snow;
And I had hoped that ere this period closed
Thou wouldst have caught me up into thy rest,
Denying not these weather-beaten limbs
The meed of saints, the white robe and the palm.
O Lord, Lord,
Thou knowest I bore this better at the first,
For I was strong and hale of body then;
And tho’ my teeth, which now are dropt away,
Would chatter with the cold, and all my beard
Was tagg’d with icy fringes in the moon,
I drown’d the whoopings of the owl with sound
Of pious hymns and psalms, and sometimes saw
An angel stand and watch me, as I sang.
The silly people take me for a saint,
And bring me offerings of fruit and flowers:
And I, in truth (thou wilt bear witness here)
Have all in all endured as much, and more
Than many just and holy men, whose names
Are register’d and calendar’d for saints.
The end! the end!
Surely the end! What’s here? a shape, a shade,
A flash of light. Is that the angel there
That holds a crown? Come, blessed brother, come.
I know thy glittering face. I waited long;
My brows are ready. What! deny it now?
Nay, draw, draw, draw nigh. So I clutch it. Christ!
’Tis gone: ’tis here again; the crown! the crown!
So now ’tis fitted on and grows to me,
And from it melt the dews of Paradise,
Sweet! sweet! spikenard, and balm, and frankincense.
Ah! let me not be fool’d, sweet saints: I trust
That I am whole, and clean, and meet for Heaven.
Proust, Paradise Lost, this blog
Here's a maxim you can have.
There's no way to say something positive about oneself and not come off badly.
Have you read IN A BUDDING GROVE? Proust tries to present himself as this precocious adolescent, and just comes across as self-absorbed and cocky.
Here's a question, though. Why should I take umbrage at Proust being cocky, at knowing how smart and witty he is? I think he is the smartest and the wittiest. I should be nodding in assent; "Yes, you *are* so great." Because, apart from this novel, that is how I feel. But, when he says it, it strikes a false note.
Milton uses this device against Satan in PARADISE LOST: Satan pretty much only talks about himself (CS Lewis calls it "incessant autobiography"), and so after a while, you kind of hate the guy, even though he starts off with all your sympathies.
This is also the premise of PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS A YOUNG MAN. Any reader who *likes* Stephen has to be a total asshole. Or, at least, someone who sympathizes with precocious, self-absorbed adolescents. We can assume this would extend to other (self-absorbed) adolescents.
Anyways, my last few posts contained references to myself that were undeniable, stone-cold facts: I like these things, I read these books at a certain age, I do such and such for a living, etc. And like, as a rule of style, no matter what, those things, which admit of no contradiction, probably irked some people at least stylistically.
Have you ever read Ayn Rand novels? They are full of people who don't understand this point. People who, because they are successful, can't understand why everyone else is not interested in them as much as they are interested in themselves.
OK, that was a trick. I actually just wrote that last paragraph to demonstrate a point. When I wrote, "people who, because they are successful", the obvious implication is, that's me, and I would like to not be under the same delusion as these characters, *while* being successful. Now, no one wants to hear that I think I am "successful," although by the strictest definition, I imagine that I am. More than that, you don't even want me to align myself with a negative example of (fictional) successful types. And it's not because you don't like me, or because you would prefer that I not be or consider myself happy or successful.
No, nothing like that. It's just a rule of writing and psychology. But here's the literary part: it's why, for a while in PARADISE LOST, we can't stand God. Because he knows he's right. Now, that is tautological, because God IS rightness in its essence, and yet we would still prefer that God be a bit humbler. This is stupid of us, yes, but you know what? I just compared myself to God. I bet you are furious.
There's no way to say something positive about oneself and not come off badly.
Have you read IN A BUDDING GROVE? Proust tries to present himself as this precocious adolescent, and just comes across as self-absorbed and cocky.
Here's a question, though. Why should I take umbrage at Proust being cocky, at knowing how smart and witty he is? I think he is the smartest and the wittiest. I should be nodding in assent; "Yes, you *are* so great." Because, apart from this novel, that is how I feel. But, when he says it, it strikes a false note.
Milton uses this device against Satan in PARADISE LOST: Satan pretty much only talks about himself (CS Lewis calls it "incessant autobiography"), and so after a while, you kind of hate the guy, even though he starts off with all your sympathies.
This is also the premise of PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS A YOUNG MAN. Any reader who *likes* Stephen has to be a total asshole. Or, at least, someone who sympathizes with precocious, self-absorbed adolescents. We can assume this would extend to other (self-absorbed) adolescents.
Anyways, my last few posts contained references to myself that were undeniable, stone-cold facts: I like these things, I read these books at a certain age, I do such and such for a living, etc. And like, as a rule of style, no matter what, those things, which admit of no contradiction, probably irked some people at least stylistically.
Have you ever read Ayn Rand novels? They are full of people who don't understand this point. People who, because they are successful, can't understand why everyone else is not interested in them as much as they are interested in themselves.
OK, that was a trick. I actually just wrote that last paragraph to demonstrate a point. When I wrote, "people who, because they are successful", the obvious implication is, that's me, and I would like to not be under the same delusion as these characters, *while* being successful. Now, no one wants to hear that I think I am "successful," although by the strictest definition, I imagine that I am. More than that, you don't even want me to align myself with a negative example of (fictional) successful types. And it's not because you don't like me, or because you would prefer that I not be or consider myself happy or successful.
No, nothing like that. It's just a rule of writing and psychology. But here's the literary part: it's why, for a while in PARADISE LOST, we can't stand God. Because he knows he's right. Now, that is tautological, because God IS rightness in its essence, and yet we would still prefer that God be a bit humbler. This is stupid of us, yes, but you know what? I just compared myself to God. I bet you are furious.
Saturday, April 28, 2007
What qualifies as "interests"?
I will post more on this later, but I was reading some dumb Village Voice article in which the author, recounting a conversation with a boyfriend who wanted her to be something she wasn't, has this inward moment of befuddlement:
I was devastated. Couldn't he see I was into the same things he was—Dostoevsky, early '90s shoegazer music and Indian food?
Now that we have the internet to prominently display our interests on social networking pages, presumably this isn't a problem any more. Although, my blogger profile lists my interests as: "iced coffee." Talya has "coffee", "snacks" and "showers". Well, that's almost as bad as Dostoievski (yeah you can spell it however you want) qua "interest."
In that Village Voice list, erhaps nothing is as weak as "Indian food" as an interest. What does that mean, that someone likes to cook Indian food? go out to Indian restaraunts? discuss Indian food? Even worse: "I was into the same things he was." Honey, EVERYONE loves samosas. This is not a bonding agent.
Recently I was half-jokingly telling someone how easy it would be to date me because I have such varied interests: Italian cinema, Victorian novels, French critical theory, German philosophy, Hollywood westerns, Jamaican reggae, Finnish hardcore, etc.
Now, I said this was "half-jokingly," and I hope you see why, but let's first say why I wasn't joking. 1) Those are interests. 2) My mom and her siblings, or my roommates, or most random people, don't have interests like this. 3) I think it's a good list. And I have Top 10 lists for each one.
More apparently, though, I was joking. Here's why:
1) Whether it is easy to date me is up for debate, but certainly "He has so many interests!" is far from being either the final word, or even necessarily positive.
2) The list is in a joke format: [Country/time period]--[genre].
3) In a way, it's really all the SAME interest to someone who doesn't care. Like, when I lived in Austin, no matter WHAT band shirt I was wearing, d-bags would be all, "Oh you like liiiive music? You must love livin' in Austin." [Which is kind of the Austin take on everything: "You like XXXX? You must love livin' in Austin."] So, my infinitely discriminating taste in various genres is ultimately irrelevant to anyone who doesn't have that same interest. Or, say: I love French New Wave films, but I would never offer that up as saying anything about myself. Because that is moronic. What would it say about me? That I am a cinephile? A francophile? A fan of classic noirs? A fan of Jerry Lewis films? An avid reader of Cahiers du Cinema?
4) As you can see, I have no idea what interests are, or why they might matter to someone else.
I'll get back to this topic in a bit (do I ever leave it) but I want to say, since we don't live in a romantic comedy, we need better shit than Dostoievski, indian food, and Pavement to qualify as an interesting person. (And I like Dostoevski and Indian food more than most things).
I was devastated. Couldn't he see I was into the same things he was—Dostoevsky, early '90s shoegazer music and Indian food?
Now that we have the internet to prominently display our interests on social networking pages, presumably this isn't a problem any more. Although, my blogger profile lists my interests as: "iced coffee." Talya has "coffee", "snacks" and "showers". Well, that's almost as bad as Dostoievski (yeah you can spell it however you want) qua "interest."
In that Village Voice list, erhaps nothing is as weak as "Indian food" as an interest. What does that mean, that someone likes to cook Indian food? go out to Indian restaraunts? discuss Indian food? Even worse: "I was into the same things he was." Honey, EVERYONE loves samosas. This is not a bonding agent.
Recently I was half-jokingly telling someone how easy it would be to date me because I have such varied interests: Italian cinema, Victorian novels, French critical theory, German philosophy, Hollywood westerns, Jamaican reggae, Finnish hardcore, etc.
Now, I said this was "half-jokingly," and I hope you see why, but let's first say why I wasn't joking. 1) Those are interests. 2) My mom and her siblings, or my roommates, or most random people, don't have interests like this. 3) I think it's a good list. And I have Top 10 lists for each one.
More apparently, though, I was joking. Here's why:
1) Whether it is easy to date me is up for debate, but certainly "He has so many interests!" is far from being either the final word, or even necessarily positive.
2) The list is in a joke format: [Country/time period]--[genre].
3) In a way, it's really all the SAME interest to someone who doesn't care. Like, when I lived in Austin, no matter WHAT band shirt I was wearing, d-bags would be all, "Oh you like liiiive music? You must love livin' in Austin." [Which is kind of the Austin take on everything: "You like XXXX? You must love livin' in Austin."] So, my infinitely discriminating taste in various genres is ultimately irrelevant to anyone who doesn't have that same interest. Or, say: I love French New Wave films, but I would never offer that up as saying anything about myself. Because that is moronic. What would it say about me? That I am a cinephile? A francophile? A fan of classic noirs? A fan of Jerry Lewis films? An avid reader of Cahiers du Cinema?
4) As you can see, I have no idea what interests are, or why they might matter to someone else.
I'll get back to this topic in a bit (do I ever leave it) but I want to say, since we don't live in a romantic comedy, we need better shit than Dostoievski, indian food, and Pavement to qualify as an interesting person. (And I like Dostoevski and Indian food more than most things).
Friday, April 27, 2007
To clarify:
A couple points about the previous post; or, THE points of the previous post.
1) Cultural knowledge is an endeavor you cannot fail at.
2) Cultural knowledge (of whatever kind), and our own history, are our imperatives as human beings.
My "big problem" with the world, then, is that if we MUST do this, and we CAN'T fail at it...then...you know...what the fuck, man?
1) Cultural knowledge is an endeavor you cannot fail at.
2) Cultural knowledge (of whatever kind), and our own history, are our imperatives as human beings.
My "big problem" with the world, then, is that if we MUST do this, and we CAN'T fail at it...then...you know...what the fuck, man?
Reading on the Subway
What people read on the subway is a kind of infinite topic, but yesterday I was really annoyed by these high school kids (who weren't reading anything, and were behaving really badly) on the train. They were just dumb. And I thought, well, here I am reading PARADISE REGAINED, and here they are just kind of babbling and swearing, and it just sucks to be surrounded by idiots while I'm trying to get work done. But then I thought about it for a while and came to rather a different conclusion.
Because, (to borrow some italics from "Grindhouse") I was reading. They weren't. By which I mean, I have prioritized my own reading since I was in 2nd grade. I was fucking precocious. I was reading THE ILIAD in 2nd grade, and from then on I was reading about six years ahead of my grade level, which meant that I had to read everything twice: BEOWULF, CRIME AND PUNISHMENT, JULIUS CAESAR, THE STRANGER, HERODOTUS, THE INFERNO, etc, all in middle school. I know, for instance, that Talya was like this as well.
It is hard to say which is the cause or effect. I made it a priority to read PETER PAN and ALICE IN WONDERLAND when I was really young, because I knew I wouldn't be able to enjoy them as much when I was older. That's weird! But actually the whole idea of "reading at one's grade level" is messed up, because I was reading: none of the other kids on my school bus were. It's not like when I was reading DON QUIXOTE, they were trying to catch up. Kids just didn't read.
In a way, I don't which I should prefer: to just BE smart or to have accomplished it myself. Obviously it's a bit of both, but let's just say I worked on it. And the moral here is, not that stupid people don't exist, or that everyone could eventually be as smart as everyone else, but that we always give up the game too early. I started reading very early, I still read. I read all the time. And unless someone is only reading trashy mystery books or airport fiction, if you can find someone who can say the same thing, I bet they are not an abject moron either. [They may not be cute and sweet like me, but that's another question.]
And here, either you agree with me, or your position is like, "dumb people know their place; why should they force themselves to read FAUST when they just want to read Allure?" I'm not okay with that question, since to me, there is obviously a class issue here: my parents were college graduates, they prized these things, they imbued me with a love of reading, and maybe everyone doesn't get to Foucault--that's fine. But it seems to me the question is always ceded *far* too early.
There are two corollaries to this:
1) In the academic world, after a certain point, it doesn't matter how smart you are. The person doing "interesting work," who has committed themselves to worthwhile values, to a rigorous methodology, to a love of literature over careerist aims, to pedagogy rather than name-dropping, to books instead of trends, may not be any smarter than someone else: but this work will be worth reading, and other stuff, perhaps written by more intelligent people, won't.
2) Cinema literacy: I got a head start on this early, too. I think everyone should. It should be taught in high school. Talya just watched "The Bicycle Thief" the other day. I had to watch that in a class in high school, and I'm all the better for it. (It's about man's search for dignity).
To be honest--a love of learning, a love of culture, having principles, etc., these things stand above raw intelligence: in my world they are the only things that matter.
And, this makes almost the entire world one extended major bum-out.
Because, (to borrow some italics from "Grindhouse") I was reading. They weren't. By which I mean, I have prioritized my own reading since I was in 2nd grade. I was fucking precocious. I was reading THE ILIAD in 2nd grade, and from then on I was reading about six years ahead of my grade level, which meant that I had to read everything twice: BEOWULF, CRIME AND PUNISHMENT, JULIUS CAESAR, THE STRANGER, HERODOTUS, THE INFERNO, etc, all in middle school. I know, for instance, that Talya was like this as well.
It is hard to say which is the cause or effect. I made it a priority to read PETER PAN and ALICE IN WONDERLAND when I was really young, because I knew I wouldn't be able to enjoy them as much when I was older. That's weird! But actually the whole idea of "reading at one's grade level" is messed up, because I was reading: none of the other kids on my school bus were. It's not like when I was reading DON QUIXOTE, they were trying to catch up. Kids just didn't read.
In a way, I don't which I should prefer: to just BE smart or to have accomplished it myself. Obviously it's a bit of both, but let's just say I worked on it. And the moral here is, not that stupid people don't exist, or that everyone could eventually be as smart as everyone else, but that we always give up the game too early. I started reading very early, I still read. I read all the time. And unless someone is only reading trashy mystery books or airport fiction, if you can find someone who can say the same thing, I bet they are not an abject moron either. [They may not be cute and sweet like me, but that's another question.]
And here, either you agree with me, or your position is like, "dumb people know their place; why should they force themselves to read FAUST when they just want to read Allure?" I'm not okay with that question, since to me, there is obviously a class issue here: my parents were college graduates, they prized these things, they imbued me with a love of reading, and maybe everyone doesn't get to Foucault--that's fine. But it seems to me the question is always ceded *far* too early.
There are two corollaries to this:
1) In the academic world, after a certain point, it doesn't matter how smart you are. The person doing "interesting work," who has committed themselves to worthwhile values, to a rigorous methodology, to a love of literature over careerist aims, to pedagogy rather than name-dropping, to books instead of trends, may not be any smarter than someone else: but this work will be worth reading, and other stuff, perhaps written by more intelligent people, won't.
2) Cinema literacy: I got a head start on this early, too. I think everyone should. It should be taught in high school. Talya just watched "The Bicycle Thief" the other day. I had to watch that in a class in high school, and I'm all the better for it. (It's about man's search for dignity).
To be honest--a love of learning, a love of culture, having principles, etc., these things stand above raw intelligence: in my world they are the only things that matter.
And, this makes almost the entire world one extended major bum-out.
Monday, April 23, 2007
Gay Marriage, A Questionable Enterprise
[Preemptive note: read the whole post before you start arguing with me.]
Consider the implications of this editorial from the NY Times.
Mr. Spitzer is right to be fighting for gay marriage. Civil unions and domestic partnerships are an important recognition of gay relationships by a state. But they still represent separate and unequal treatment. One federal study identified more than 1,100 rights or benefits that are accorded only to the legally married. That means that even in states recognizing civil unions and domestic partnerships, gay couples often have to use legal contortions to protect their families in ways that married couples take for granted. Gay couples may also be discriminated against when it comes to taxes and pension benefits.
The argumentative blocks of this paragraph are as follows:
1) Many states recognize civil unions and domestic partnerships.
2) Although these fall short of "marriage," they are well-intentioned.
3) However, these good intentions neglect the practical "discriminations" against those who are not fully and legally married.
4) Therefore, NY should pass a law legalizing gay marriage as opposed to these half-measures.
This logic is specious at best, because it ALSO assumes the following:
1) Gay people should want to buy into the institution of marriage
2) Only gay people are being "discriminated against" by marriage laws (taxes, pensions, etc).
3) That it is easier to promote gay people to marriageable citizens rather than dismantling an obviously-prejudicial pro-marriage system.
I would have to be really naive not to see that gay marriage is a hot issue for reasons other than those having to do with pensions; and obviously straight people who choose not to get married are in a different situation: BUT REALLY, MARRIAGE IS DUMB. Anything the Catholic Church and George Bush are so keen on defending, which is THE institution for reinforcing RHN (reproductive heteronormativity), that is (even in this pro-marriage editorial) an instrument of discrimination, socially compulsory, homophobic, patriarchal, etc. etc. etc.
So, gay marriage. Excuse me for my lack of enthusiasm about it. In my mind, it will only ever be (gay) marriage. And as long as the issue of homosexuality is an issue about "tolerance" and "the other," these are the sorts of ultimately irrelevant battles that will take place (over constitutional amendments): ones that ultimately supports "the system" and self-ascribes to degrading legalisms, etc. In short, marriage IS homophobic; why try to play their game?
Consider the implications of this editorial from the NY Times.
Mr. Spitzer is right to be fighting for gay marriage. Civil unions and domestic partnerships are an important recognition of gay relationships by a state. But they still represent separate and unequal treatment. One federal study identified more than 1,100 rights or benefits that are accorded only to the legally married. That means that even in states recognizing civil unions and domestic partnerships, gay couples often have to use legal contortions to protect their families in ways that married couples take for granted. Gay couples may also be discriminated against when it comes to taxes and pension benefits.
The argumentative blocks of this paragraph are as follows:
1) Many states recognize civil unions and domestic partnerships.
2) Although these fall short of "marriage," they are well-intentioned.
3) However, these good intentions neglect the practical "discriminations" against those who are not fully and legally married.
4) Therefore, NY should pass a law legalizing gay marriage as opposed to these half-measures.
This logic is specious at best, because it ALSO assumes the following:
1) Gay people should want to buy into the institution of marriage
2) Only gay people are being "discriminated against" by marriage laws (taxes, pensions, etc).
3) That it is easier to promote gay people to marriageable citizens rather than dismantling an obviously-prejudicial pro-marriage system.
I would have to be really naive not to see that gay marriage is a hot issue for reasons other than those having to do with pensions; and obviously straight people who choose not to get married are in a different situation: BUT REALLY, MARRIAGE IS DUMB. Anything the Catholic Church and George Bush are so keen on defending, which is THE institution for reinforcing RHN (reproductive heteronormativity), that is (even in this pro-marriage editorial) an instrument of discrimination, socially compulsory, homophobic, patriarchal, etc. etc. etc.
So, gay marriage. Excuse me for my lack of enthusiasm about it. In my mind, it will only ever be (gay) marriage. And as long as the issue of homosexuality is an issue about "tolerance" and "the other," these are the sorts of ultimately irrelevant battles that will take place (over constitutional amendments): ones that ultimately supports "the system" and self-ascribes to degrading legalisms, etc. In short, marriage IS homophobic; why try to play their game?
Saturday, April 21, 2007
What I Do
[Preface i]
Right now I am reading PARADISE LOST, which is one of my favorite books, but I am in the middle of the most boring part, where the angel Raphael is explaining Ptolomeian astrophysics to Adam: Zzzzzz. Thus, time for a blog post!
[Preface ii]
The other day I was talking with a friend and our conversation wandered into the frontier where basically we were complaining that "no one understands us." This seemingly juvenile claim is probably the truth of existence. I am always shocked (shocked!) to hear people repeat back to me what they think I am saying, or hear descriptions of myself, etc. (Except in obvious cases where of course what someone thinks about me says everything about them and is therefore predictable.) And that all could be really petty. However, the very claim of "what I do" is that I understand things and their meanings. I think I "get" Dickens and Proust and Trollope, in a way that I probably don't "get" any person whom I actually know. My job is basically to express this understanding--and if this blog is any indication, my writing does not produce the same universal head-nodding as a novel.
In a way, then, criticism is a very sad thing. It takes something that everyone loves, like OLIVER TWIST, and turns it into something we probably can't all agree on, that we may even argue about. This all sounds very naive, as if the question of criticism were only, "What is XXXX book about?"
That is not what I mean, though. For me, the question of criticism is as follows.
[What I Do]
There are numerous criticisms. Let's name a few. New Historicism. Deconstruction. New Criticism. Queer Criticism. Post-colonial. Marxist. History of the book. Reader Response. And so forth. What one immediately notices when listing these schools is that a few are totalizing and others are partial. Queer criticism won't tell us everything about a work. New Criticism pretends to. This is a dialectic.
In life (which I separate from academia), I am a fan of all the questions motivating these schools. What history underlies a fictional work? Why is this work *good* or how does it mean anything at all? How should one teach it? What are its political implications or overt commitments? What can we learn from it about the central human question of sexuality? and so forth. As "interesting topics," they are all fine. They are not my topic.
I actually would like to play dumb as regards literature. New Criticism's question is something like, "how does this thing, literature, work?" My question is even more naive: "How is it this thing even is at all?" For me, "the thing" is the novel. The novel qua literature, and the great 19th century novels qua Novel. [An interesting project suggested by a recent conversation: what is the implicit formal criticism of the 19th century novel as seen by the development of the Modernist novel? There is, as Spivak would say, a "criticism-shaped hole" in the Modernist novel.]
Narratology approaches this question but does not ask it. Roland Barthes' semiological analysis (especially in S/Z, hands-down the critical work I admire most) asks it, but his answer is already its methodology.
What I am not interested in:
- thematic criticism. What a book is "about" or conspicuously *not* about. Edward Said's superb criticism of MANSFIELD PARK falls into the latter category, while ORIENTALISM into the former. [I love Edward Said. A source of infinite encouragement. His early book BEGINNINGS also approaches what I would like to do.]
- the topic of reading. First, criticism is already reading, and vice versa. Second, while I am with Kant on "we can only know our impression of things, not the thing itself", studies of reading can be weirdly sociological or beside the point of the individual text. Ie: what is the difference between reading LITTLE DORRIT and MARTIN CHUZZLEWIT? Probably not one that can be explained by the concept of "reading."
- the "bad" deconstruction of J. Hillis Miller. Really there is nothing more dated or embarrassing.
- discourse analysis/cultural analysis. A novel is not one writing among others. The novel, the Magna Carta, a politician's speech, an essay by Hannah Arendt, and a legal brief are not all the same. "Duh," you think. But I mean it. For one, as "discourse" one immediately runs into (Bakhtin's notion of) the dialogical discourse employed by the novel and NOT employed by these other forms [two different meanings of discourse here, but you take my point]. By "culture", I mean: "What Victorians thought about XXXX." The novel is both a limited, and it seems wrong-headed way to access these thoughts. The novel is SO individual. A "communal" form like the epic would seem much better for cultural analysis, although again, only quasi-psychoanalytically or imaginatively: what a culture fantasizes about itself.
That is what I don't do. A real failure to me is the recent book by Nancy Armstrong, "How Novels Think," which is a fine book, but the title is misleading [it is about historical ideas of the subject and individualism in the novel]--but how DO novels think? What are its elements? Genre, narration, character, plot, etc. We are a long way from having said all there is to say about these things. Take TRISTRAM SHANDY for instance. No genre. No plot. A paper I wrote about OUR MUTUAL FRIEND questions the limits of what counts as "a character" in a Charles Dickens novel. I just finished my MA thesis about the multiplicity of locations of narration in GREAT EXPECTATIONS. The closer we look, the more these banal categories which nonetheless form our conception of the Novel--the more insufficient they seem, the more they call for troubling and redefinition. And if Character and Narration are no longer stable terms, how can we then proceed to treat these works as thematically/politically coherent?
So, to blatantly pose Heidegger, before we do anything else with novels, we need to be able to say how it is that they ARE novels in the first place. What it means. *How* they mean. This may tend increasingly towards a "linguistics" of literature that would expand on Jakobson, Bakhtin, and Barthes. [Not yet how it is that "there are" novels in the first place, which probably belongs to a different discipline.] Not to take novels for granted, not to lose sight of their strangeness, not to forget that each one is its own world, and not to imagine that there ever could be an answer to this question. [Or, at least, an answer better than "prose fiction over a certain length.] This question needs to be historicized, indeed even the question has a history, and probably seems too vague without looking at specific criticism that I mean, but I think the question can be seen in Said (BEGINNINGS), Franco Moretti (ATLAS OF THE EUROPEAN NOVEL), Bakhtin, DA Miller (NARRATIVE AND ITS DISCONTENTS), Barthes (S/Z), Peter Brooks (READING FOR THE PLOT), as well as many works that approach the question more tangentially (Henry James' criticism, Fredric Jameson's POLITICAL UNCONSCIOUS)--but certainly *not* in dissertations/books that take a theme and have 5 chapters on 5 novels taking up that theme. This appears to be the majority of graduate work, and although misunderstanding is built into understanding, I hope no one will ever misunderstand what I do to be a variety of that practice.
DAVID COPPERFIELD (or REMEMBRANCE OF THINGS PAST, or PARADISE LOST) may be the greatest and most astonishing thing ever produced by a human mind. I'm not joking.
It is certainly not the business of the everyday.
Right now I am reading PARADISE LOST, which is one of my favorite books, but I am in the middle of the most boring part, where the angel Raphael is explaining Ptolomeian astrophysics to Adam: Zzzzzz. Thus, time for a blog post!
[Preface ii]
The other day I was talking with a friend and our conversation wandered into the frontier where basically we were complaining that "no one understands us." This seemingly juvenile claim is probably the truth of existence. I am always shocked (shocked!) to hear people repeat back to me what they think I am saying, or hear descriptions of myself, etc. (Except in obvious cases where of course what someone thinks about me says everything about them and is therefore predictable.) And that all could be really petty. However, the very claim of "what I do" is that I understand things and their meanings. I think I "get" Dickens and Proust and Trollope, in a way that I probably don't "get" any person whom I actually know. My job is basically to express this understanding--and if this blog is any indication, my writing does not produce the same universal head-nodding as a novel.
In a way, then, criticism is a very sad thing. It takes something that everyone loves, like OLIVER TWIST, and turns it into something we probably can't all agree on, that we may even argue about. This all sounds very naive, as if the question of criticism were only, "What is XXXX book about?"
That is not what I mean, though. For me, the question of criticism is as follows.
[What I Do]
There are numerous criticisms. Let's name a few. New Historicism. Deconstruction. New Criticism. Queer Criticism. Post-colonial. Marxist. History of the book. Reader Response. And so forth. What one immediately notices when listing these schools is that a few are totalizing and others are partial. Queer criticism won't tell us everything about a work. New Criticism pretends to. This is a dialectic.
In life (which I separate from academia), I am a fan of all the questions motivating these schools. What history underlies a fictional work? Why is this work *good* or how does it mean anything at all? How should one teach it? What are its political implications or overt commitments? What can we learn from it about the central human question of sexuality? and so forth. As "interesting topics," they are all fine. They are not my topic.
I actually would like to play dumb as regards literature. New Criticism's question is something like, "how does this thing, literature, work?" My question is even more naive: "How is it this thing even is at all?" For me, "the thing" is the novel. The novel qua literature, and the great 19th century novels qua Novel. [An interesting project suggested by a recent conversation: what is the implicit formal criticism of the 19th century novel as seen by the development of the Modernist novel? There is, as Spivak would say, a "criticism-shaped hole" in the Modernist novel.]
Narratology approaches this question but does not ask it. Roland Barthes' semiological analysis (especially in S/Z, hands-down the critical work I admire most) asks it, but his answer is already its methodology.
What I am not interested in:
- thematic criticism. What a book is "about" or conspicuously *not* about. Edward Said's superb criticism of MANSFIELD PARK falls into the latter category, while ORIENTALISM into the former. [I love Edward Said. A source of infinite encouragement. His early book BEGINNINGS also approaches what I would like to do.]
- the topic of reading. First, criticism is already reading, and vice versa. Second, while I am with Kant on "we can only know our impression of things, not the thing itself", studies of reading can be weirdly sociological or beside the point of the individual text. Ie: what is the difference between reading LITTLE DORRIT and MARTIN CHUZZLEWIT? Probably not one that can be explained by the concept of "reading."
- the "bad" deconstruction of J. Hillis Miller. Really there is nothing more dated or embarrassing.
- discourse analysis/cultural analysis. A novel is not one writing among others. The novel, the Magna Carta, a politician's speech, an essay by Hannah Arendt, and a legal brief are not all the same. "Duh," you think. But I mean it. For one, as "discourse" one immediately runs into (Bakhtin's notion of) the dialogical discourse employed by the novel and NOT employed by these other forms [two different meanings of discourse here, but you take my point]. By "culture", I mean: "What Victorians thought about XXXX." The novel is both a limited, and it seems wrong-headed way to access these thoughts. The novel is SO individual. A "communal" form like the epic would seem much better for cultural analysis, although again, only quasi-psychoanalytically or imaginatively: what a culture fantasizes about itself.
That is what I don't do. A real failure to me is the recent book by Nancy Armstrong, "How Novels Think," which is a fine book, but the title is misleading [it is about historical ideas of the subject and individualism in the novel]--but how DO novels think? What are its elements? Genre, narration, character, plot, etc. We are a long way from having said all there is to say about these things. Take TRISTRAM SHANDY for instance. No genre. No plot. A paper I wrote about OUR MUTUAL FRIEND questions the limits of what counts as "a character" in a Charles Dickens novel. I just finished my MA thesis about the multiplicity of locations of narration in GREAT EXPECTATIONS. The closer we look, the more these banal categories which nonetheless form our conception of the Novel--the more insufficient they seem, the more they call for troubling and redefinition. And if Character and Narration are no longer stable terms, how can we then proceed to treat these works as thematically/politically coherent?
So, to blatantly pose Heidegger, before we do anything else with novels, we need to be able to say how it is that they ARE novels in the first place. What it means. *How* they mean. This may tend increasingly towards a "linguistics" of literature that would expand on Jakobson, Bakhtin, and Barthes. [Not yet how it is that "there are" novels in the first place, which probably belongs to a different discipline.] Not to take novels for granted, not to lose sight of their strangeness, not to forget that each one is its own world, and not to imagine that there ever could be an answer to this question. [Or, at least, an answer better than "prose fiction over a certain length.] This question needs to be historicized, indeed even the question has a history, and probably seems too vague without looking at specific criticism that I mean, but I think the question can be seen in Said (BEGINNINGS), Franco Moretti (ATLAS OF THE EUROPEAN NOVEL), Bakhtin, DA Miller (NARRATIVE AND ITS DISCONTENTS), Barthes (S/Z), Peter Brooks (READING FOR THE PLOT), as well as many works that approach the question more tangentially (Henry James' criticism, Fredric Jameson's POLITICAL UNCONSCIOUS)--but certainly *not* in dissertations/books that take a theme and have 5 chapters on 5 novels taking up that theme. This appears to be the majority of graduate work, and although misunderstanding is built into understanding, I hope no one will ever misunderstand what I do to be a variety of that practice.
DAVID COPPERFIELD (or REMEMBRANCE OF THINGS PAST, or PARADISE LOST) may be the greatest and most astonishing thing ever produced by a human mind. I'm not joking.
It is certainly not the business of the everyday.
Friday, April 20, 2007
Those fucking losers (part two)
Representative Peter Hoekstra, a Michigan Republican, said: “If Harry Reid believes that this war is lost, where is his plan to win this war?”
Thursday, April 12, 2007
Those fucking losers
Let me tell you a story about myself that I think will explain EVERYTHING.
The other day, I was downtown waiting for two friends to meet me outside of a restaurant. OK, so I am standing there, with my worries, watching people go by on this very busy street, checking everyone out but kind of spacing, too--and see one of my friends coming down the street, and in front of him are these two guys. They are basically, like, what you would call "skater dudes," but the NY hipster version: some kind of amazing-core hoodies, new era hats, girls jeans, and kind of puffy sneakers. But they were dressed exactly the same and not-at-all the same, simultaneously. Like, one of them was wearing a hoodie with a jacket over it, one of their jeans was flared a bit (bad choice), their hats were different, okay--but they were wearing THE SAME SHOES. Or, conspicuously close enough to the same shoes. And it made them look like they just didn't get it, or they had just raided Urban Outfitters. You could envision their bummed-out looks when they were pulling their new clothes out of their big Urb bags, and saying, "Dude! That's so rad!" up until they saw they had bought the same shoes.
So, I am trying to point this out to Spencer when he rolls up, but he didn't really see the guys, so I'm explaining this thing-only-I-could-care-about in this exaggerated way: "They looked like FOOLS!" etc, until Spencer interrupts me and says, "Ben, can I tell you something?" and points at the ground.
"WE are wearing the same shoes." (ie: black converse hi-top all stars).
The other day, I was downtown waiting for two friends to meet me outside of a restaurant. OK, so I am standing there, with my worries, watching people go by on this very busy street, checking everyone out but kind of spacing, too--and see one of my friends coming down the street, and in front of him are these two guys. They are basically, like, what you would call "skater dudes," but the NY hipster version: some kind of amazing-core hoodies, new era hats, girls jeans, and kind of puffy sneakers. But they were dressed exactly the same and not-at-all the same, simultaneously. Like, one of them was wearing a hoodie with a jacket over it, one of their jeans was flared a bit (bad choice), their hats were different, okay--but they were wearing THE SAME SHOES. Or, conspicuously close enough to the same shoes. And it made them look like they just didn't get it, or they had just raided Urban Outfitters. You could envision their bummed-out looks when they were pulling their new clothes out of their big Urb bags, and saying, "Dude! That's so rad!" up until they saw they had bought the same shoes.
So, I am trying to point this out to Spencer when he rolls up, but he didn't really see the guys, so I'm explaining this thing-only-I-could-care-about in this exaggerated way: "They looked like FOOLS!" etc, until Spencer interrupts me and says, "Ben, can I tell you something?" and points at the ground.
"WE are wearing the same shoes." (ie: black converse hi-top all stars).
Friday, April 06, 2007
Cry of the Soul
Let me tell you a story. Talya and I were eating a kind of crappy meal at this lame pan-asian restaraunt across the street from my school: hot, rushed, too many toddlers, a million people on staff. Ok, we were just in and out of there, basically, but we were sitting next to this foursome who were definitely on some kind of double-date. They were in their early fourties or late thirties, none of them attractive, wearing some mishmash of Gap or J. Crew clothes, but really haphazardly and unflatteringly. And clearly they were not "catching up" in the sense of this going on all night, but they were probably going to see a movie after eating at this crappy, cheap place.
Anyways, Rick Springfield's "Jesse's Girl" comes on in the background. There's only one conversation to have, really: the awesome scene in Boogie Nights where they are trying to sell all this baking soda as cocaine, and the druglord insists that they reverentially listen to "Jesse's Girl." That is the conversation, ok? But instead, these douchebag dudes who are "old enough to remember when" just kind of gesture verbally towards some potential nostalgia or (you'll see) I don't know what.
- "Oh, hey...Rick Springfield..."
- "Jesse's Girl"
- "This was his one big song..."
[Not true. Rick Springfield may have only one song that made its way to 2007, but certainly for these old losers, Rick Springfield had several more hits during their teenage years.]
- "I still know all the words."
- "Of course...everybody does."
IMPORTANT MOMENT. So, after this last thing, the guy turns to his wife, who has not been in this conversation, and kind-of shimmys his eyebrows at her, suggestively.
Signalling, BEN'S MIND BLOWN.
What did this eyebrow-raising mean?
1) That he had just said something clever, and this was a call for acknowledgement of that.
2) That he was being sarcastic to the other guy's face, and this was a signal to her that something was going on under the surface.
[So, that something he had said was worth taking notice of. Which it precisely WASN'T.]
3) Vaguely, something like: hey, we're going to have sex later, so I'm sorry that I am leaving you out of this conversation.
[This is part of it, I think, but here's the real explanation]:
4) "Well, here we are. We have nothing better to talk about than this thing that none of us care about; we just ate some bad food and we still have a few hours to spend with these people, and with each other. And after we get home, I still am going to have to see you for the rest of my life, and you aren't getting any younger and neither am I. Not only did I not say something clever, but I have lost even the capability of being embarrassed about that, and these morons we are eating with didn't even notice." Basically, the gurgling sound of the disappearance of any irony towards one's own, now-unretrievably-worthless life being swallowed in the slime of hopelessness, disguised as a comment to his wife: "Like, we're in this together" never seemed so threatening.
They were very expressive eyebrows.
Anyways, Rick Springfield's "Jesse's Girl" comes on in the background. There's only one conversation to have, really: the awesome scene in Boogie Nights where they are trying to sell all this baking soda as cocaine, and the druglord insists that they reverentially listen to "Jesse's Girl." That is the conversation, ok? But instead, these douchebag dudes who are "old enough to remember when" just kind of gesture verbally towards some potential nostalgia or (you'll see) I don't know what.
- "Oh, hey...Rick Springfield..."
- "Jesse's Girl"
- "This was his one big song..."
[Not true. Rick Springfield may have only one song that made its way to 2007, but certainly for these old losers, Rick Springfield had several more hits during their teenage years.]
- "I still know all the words."
- "Of course...everybody does."
IMPORTANT MOMENT. So, after this last thing, the guy turns to his wife, who has not been in this conversation, and kind-of shimmys his eyebrows at her, suggestively.
Signalling, BEN'S MIND BLOWN.
What did this eyebrow-raising mean?
1) That he had just said something clever, and this was a call for acknowledgement of that.
2) That he was being sarcastic to the other guy's face, and this was a signal to her that something was going on under the surface.
[So, that something he had said was worth taking notice of. Which it precisely WASN'T.]
3) Vaguely, something like: hey, we're going to have sex later, so I'm sorry that I am leaving you out of this conversation.
[This is part of it, I think, but here's the real explanation]:
4) "Well, here we are. We have nothing better to talk about than this thing that none of us care about; we just ate some bad food and we still have a few hours to spend with these people, and with each other. And after we get home, I still am going to have to see you for the rest of my life, and you aren't getting any younger and neither am I. Not only did I not say something clever, but I have lost even the capability of being embarrassed about that, and these morons we are eating with didn't even notice." Basically, the gurgling sound of the disappearance of any irony towards one's own, now-unretrievably-worthless life being swallowed in the slime of hopelessness, disguised as a comment to his wife: "Like, we're in this together" never seemed so threatening.
They were very expressive eyebrows.
Tuesday, March 20, 2007
My Spring Break
Hey, so I was in San Francisco last week hanging with Golnar, Thera and Chris. Also a hello to Logan, Layla, Christy, and Ben Howell. Here are some pictures from my trip, taken by Talya, my delightful traveling companion:
Here I am looking at the Pacific Ocean. Like Balboa before me (is it a coincidence that they played the new ROCKY movie on the plane?), this was an inspiring and ambitious moment for me. In the distance you can see the first of several ships that I thought were Alcatraz, which turns out to be in the Bay, not in the Ocean. Note the profound, awestruck pose.
In my vanity, I always imagine that my profile is to be avoided at all costs, but actually this is not a bad shot, if you correct (imaginatively) for my squinting.
Here I am playing ping pong at MRR. Note the exotic grip I use on the paddle. Also--am I really that skinny?!
Christy, Thera, me. Being surly.
Here I am looking at the Pacific Ocean. Like Balboa before me (is it a coincidence that they played the new ROCKY movie on the plane?), this was an inspiring and ambitious moment for me. In the distance you can see the first of several ships that I thought were Alcatraz, which turns out to be in the Bay, not in the Ocean. Note the profound, awestruck pose.
In my vanity, I always imagine that my profile is to be avoided at all costs, but actually this is not a bad shot, if you correct (imaginatively) for my squinting.
Here I am playing ping pong at MRR. Note the exotic grip I use on the paddle. Also--am I really that skinny?!
Christy, Thera, me. Being surly.
Monday, March 05, 2007
Update
I'd like to take the power that I have over your attention right now to point you towards a fabulous project my friends Si and Lyle have embarked upon: a blog of their simultaneous readings of BEING AND TIME, reputedly the hardest philosophy book ever written. (Although probably not the hardest book, period; which probably is still FINNEGAN'S WAKE. In a way, one suspects that we maybe have moved past the era of "impossible" books--Derrida's GLAS being the most recent one I can think of, with the exception of an undying obnoxious pop post-modernist tendency.)
The highest comment I can pay their blog is that I instantly want to copy it and wish I had thought of it first. Also, I wish I wasn't reading 3,000 other books right now instead, so that I could jump into the stream of BEING AND TIME. I am reading Kant's CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON right now, and I plan to finish the other two critiques, Hegel's PHENOMENOLOGY, and some Husserl before I make it to Heidegger (perhaps with a detour into Nietzsche). I have adopted this scheme, not in order to "structure" Philosophy into some chronological Greatest Hits, but so that I will actually finish the books I start, instead of picking up Schopenhauer here, Lyotard there, etc., and kind of drifting about (which would be fine if I had the time).
Other books I think could have a good reading-blog:
Walter Benjamin's ARCADES PROJECT
Karl Marx's CAPITAL
Jacques Derrida's GLAS (or THE POST CARD)
Deleuze/Guattari- CAPITALISM AND SCHIZOPHRENIA (2 vols)
Samuel Richardson's CLARISSA
Sterne's TRISTRAM SHANDY
Cervantes or Rabelais
Ezra Pound's CANTOS
Franz Kafka's short fiction
So maybe I will do one of those (or something else) one of these days. Who's with me?
The highest comment I can pay their blog is that I instantly want to copy it and wish I had thought of it first. Also, I wish I wasn't reading 3,000 other books right now instead, so that I could jump into the stream of BEING AND TIME. I am reading Kant's CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON right now, and I plan to finish the other two critiques, Hegel's PHENOMENOLOGY, and some Husserl before I make it to Heidegger (perhaps with a detour into Nietzsche). I have adopted this scheme, not in order to "structure" Philosophy into some chronological Greatest Hits, but so that I will actually finish the books I start, instead of picking up Schopenhauer here, Lyotard there, etc., and kind of drifting about (which would be fine if I had the time).
Other books I think could have a good reading-blog:
Walter Benjamin's ARCADES PROJECT
Karl Marx's CAPITAL
Jacques Derrida's GLAS (or THE POST CARD)
Deleuze/Guattari- CAPITALISM AND SCHIZOPHRENIA (2 vols)
Samuel Richardson's CLARISSA
Sterne's TRISTRAM SHANDY
Cervantes or Rabelais
Ezra Pound's CANTOS
Franz Kafka's short fiction
So maybe I will do one of those (or something else) one of these days. Who's with me?
Thursday, March 01, 2007
Jesus Christ... Superstar
I only have time to write this blog because one of my classes was moved an hour later, and I forgot and showed up to an empty classroom, and now have an hour to kill.
So, ever since a couple years ago, when I walked into Kim's and they were playing this movie downstairs, I have wanted to watch Jesus Christ Superstar. Nearly the entire thing is posted on youtube, so I "prepped" myself and finally worked up the will to rent it.
As you may or may not know, Jesus Christ Superstar was a rock-opera double-album *before* it was ever staged as a musical. The album, from what I can tell, "stars" Ian Gillan, the lead singer of Deep Purple, as Jesus---a part he obviously was unfit to play in the film version. The premise of the whole thing is, Jesus as a charismatic proto-rock-star, with fans and groupies, etc.
What I am surprised at, is not that Christian groups protested the musical, but that they did it for all the wrong reasons and have evidently now embraced it. Because, kitsch aside, the film is completely heretical and anti-Christian. (Which was surprising to me).
Main heresies:
- That the deification of Christ is just a "myth."
- That his immediate followers "twisted around" his words (ie: the Gospels)
- That his political mission was more important than his personal charisma, for which it was sacrificed.
- Judas is resurrected (for the main show number: he descends in white fringe on a cross from heaven), but not Jesus.
- The Crucifixion scene is a bum-out after which everyone gets on the bus and leaves, wondering what "went wrong."
- That Jesus didn't die for our sins, but rather for some mistaken hubris and political naivete.
- That Jesus' mission on earth was not really a success.
WHOA. I can't believe that Christians go to see this. As I was telling my co-watcher, if there is ONE principle of Christianity, it is Jesus' divinity, which this movie shits all over. So bizarre.
There are the requisite horrible songs, the shameless pastiche of soul styles onto klezmer, folk, gospel, and faux-orchestral parts; NO sets; the entire film is shot from 50 yards away from the actors; Judas has all the best songs but Jesus' are easily the worst; there are plenty of false notes and self-conscious kitsch, where one wants to say, Who felt the need to ADD kitsch to this?; and finally, it's a directorial hack job-- Norman Jewison.
Evidently, reasons for protesting this film in the day (1973) have now been turned into the bedrock of the Christian youth movement: irony, "rock" music, a bunch of kids having fun, slight irreverence (calling Jesus "JC"), little attention to church dogma, etc. In short, a total triumph of style over substance, which is ironic, because the movie is so awkwardly-insistent upon its substance. Or maybe that's just me, who can't believe that any Christian would go along with this movie's point: basically a replication of Borges' story, "Three Versions of Judas"--Judas is the real protagonist of the Gospels, his suicide is the real martyrdom, etc. What remains (for me) is to think how much the movie intends its blasphemies *as such*, ie: if Tim Rice really thinks, "Jesus should have done things differently and not thrown his political mission away on this fantasy of being god," or...well...that seems to be the only option right now.
And, to anyone who thinks it is weird that I am thinking about this, or watching this movie, well--then you don't really know me. But I should say, the movie is pretty much HORRIBLE, and I totally recommend it, but not in a "so bad it's good" way; rather, in an "it's horrible AND it's good" way.
So, ever since a couple years ago, when I walked into Kim's and they were playing this movie downstairs, I have wanted to watch Jesus Christ Superstar. Nearly the entire thing is posted on youtube, so I "prepped" myself and finally worked up the will to rent it.
As you may or may not know, Jesus Christ Superstar was a rock-opera double-album *before* it was ever staged as a musical. The album, from what I can tell, "stars" Ian Gillan, the lead singer of Deep Purple, as Jesus---a part he obviously was unfit to play in the film version. The premise of the whole thing is, Jesus as a charismatic proto-rock-star, with fans and groupies, etc.
What I am surprised at, is not that Christian groups protested the musical, but that they did it for all the wrong reasons and have evidently now embraced it. Because, kitsch aside, the film is completely heretical and anti-Christian. (Which was surprising to me).
Main heresies:
- That the deification of Christ is just a "myth."
- That his immediate followers "twisted around" his words (ie: the Gospels)
- That his political mission was more important than his personal charisma, for which it was sacrificed.
- Judas is resurrected (for the main show number: he descends in white fringe on a cross from heaven), but not Jesus.
- The Crucifixion scene is a bum-out after which everyone gets on the bus and leaves, wondering what "went wrong."
- That Jesus didn't die for our sins, but rather for some mistaken hubris and political naivete.
- That Jesus' mission on earth was not really a success.
WHOA. I can't believe that Christians go to see this. As I was telling my co-watcher, if there is ONE principle of Christianity, it is Jesus' divinity, which this movie shits all over. So bizarre.
There are the requisite horrible songs, the shameless pastiche of soul styles onto klezmer, folk, gospel, and faux-orchestral parts; NO sets; the entire film is shot from 50 yards away from the actors; Judas has all the best songs but Jesus' are easily the worst; there are plenty of false notes and self-conscious kitsch, where one wants to say, Who felt the need to ADD kitsch to this?; and finally, it's a directorial hack job-- Norman Jewison.
Evidently, reasons for protesting this film in the day (1973) have now been turned into the bedrock of the Christian youth movement: irony, "rock" music, a bunch of kids having fun, slight irreverence (calling Jesus "JC"), little attention to church dogma, etc. In short, a total triumph of style over substance, which is ironic, because the movie is so awkwardly-insistent upon its substance. Or maybe that's just me, who can't believe that any Christian would go along with this movie's point: basically a replication of Borges' story, "Three Versions of Judas"--Judas is the real protagonist of the Gospels, his suicide is the real martyrdom, etc. What remains (for me) is to think how much the movie intends its blasphemies *as such*, ie: if Tim Rice really thinks, "Jesus should have done things differently and not thrown his political mission away on this fantasy of being god," or...well...that seems to be the only option right now.
And, to anyone who thinks it is weird that I am thinking about this, or watching this movie, well--then you don't really know me. But I should say, the movie is pretty much HORRIBLE, and I totally recommend it, but not in a "so bad it's good" way; rather, in an "it's horrible AND it's good" way.
Friday, February 16, 2007
Just so that someone will have said it...
[From the NY Times article on the non-binding House Resolution against a troop increase in Iraq]:
Despite the emotions on both sides, there were moments of agreement. Ms. Pelosi drew sustained applause when she said that everyone in the chamber praised the valor and sacrifice of Americans serving in Iraq.
Only in a Christian nation like America could there be such a "love the sinner, hate the sin" attitude, unquestioningly and nauseatingly repeated, always for political purposes, and without any real meaning.
What does it mean to "support" American troops in Iraq?
- To fund the brutal war of racist occupation they are waging?
- To praise those who continue to enlist after all pretense of the original (even then dubious) motive for the war has been dropped?
- To hope that "their guys" get killed when they come up against "our guys"?
Now, I'm not completely naive. I understand the political meaning behind saying "We support our troops"--and as long as that is a completely meaningless sound-bite, I guess I don't mind. But the second it actually comes to wanting an American soldier to "do his duty" and kill an Iraqi, or valiantly give up his own life, or have expensive new equipment, or even report for duty in the morning--then I am against such support. The only troops I "support" are those who desert or refuse to serve. This war is bullshit and anyone engaged in it is bullshit and I don't support the individuals without whose participation it could not continue.
[And to those who will say, desertion and subordination are hardly options, Ben!; I say: if someone told you, either you go out and kill in the name of a bogus cause, or spend time in jail and possibly ruin your life and bring disgrace upon your family---to me, there is no excuse for saving one's own skin* by shooting other people; it's disgusting.]
*= And I hardly imagine it comes down to this moral dilemma for our valiant troops--and why should it, when they are so kindly praised and supported in their execution of duty?
Despite the emotions on both sides, there were moments of agreement. Ms. Pelosi drew sustained applause when she said that everyone in the chamber praised the valor and sacrifice of Americans serving in Iraq.
Only in a Christian nation like America could there be such a "love the sinner, hate the sin" attitude, unquestioningly and nauseatingly repeated, always for political purposes, and without any real meaning.
What does it mean to "support" American troops in Iraq?
- To fund the brutal war of racist occupation they are waging?
- To praise those who continue to enlist after all pretense of the original (even then dubious) motive for the war has been dropped?
- To hope that "their guys" get killed when they come up against "our guys"?
Now, I'm not completely naive. I understand the political meaning behind saying "We support our troops"--and as long as that is a completely meaningless sound-bite, I guess I don't mind. But the second it actually comes to wanting an American soldier to "do his duty" and kill an Iraqi, or valiantly give up his own life, or have expensive new equipment, or even report for duty in the morning--then I am against such support. The only troops I "support" are those who desert or refuse to serve. This war is bullshit and anyone engaged in it is bullshit and I don't support the individuals without whose participation it could not continue.
[And to those who will say, desertion and subordination are hardly options, Ben!; I say: if someone told you, either you go out and kill in the name of a bogus cause, or spend time in jail and possibly ruin your life and bring disgrace upon your family---to me, there is no excuse for saving one's own skin* by shooting other people; it's disgusting.]
*= And I hardly imagine it comes down to this moral dilemma for our valiant troops--and why should it, when they are so kindly praised and supported in their execution of duty?
Thursday, February 15, 2007
Pop Music
The last time I wrote something about pop music, it was to say how unsatisfying "pure pop" is in an album context. For instance, compare the Buzzcocks singles to their albums. The albums have stretched out songs, instrumentals, different styles--while their singles show only one side of the band (albeit to great success). The same could be said of a lot of great artists: anyone who buys Bob Dylan's "Greatest Hits" is in for some good tunes, but you miss the inspired album tracks like "It's Alright, Ma" and "It Takes a Lot To Laugh..."
This almost could lead to a discussion of "two types of artists": one type capable of writing songs in a variety of formats, and another type that is oriented towards only one thing. So, the Velvet Underground, Wire, Joy Division, The Cure, Fucked Up on one hand, and Black Sabbath, Gang of Four, Motorhead, Pink Floyd, CCR, The Ramones, The Kinks on the other hand.
But that is not an argument I'm really interested in making--since the dichotomy really proves itself: in the division between "variety" and "unity," everything is varied if you look close enough at one level, and everything blends together if you zoom back far enough.
Rather, I would like to point out that everything needn't come down to pop music in the end. This seems to be the logic of the day, when Justin Timberlake is the most universally-beloved artist.
Take the Ramones, for instance. The general take on the Ramones is that they were influenced by Phil Spector pop, the trashy glam-pop of the NY Dolls, and pre-Beatles American pop-rock like the songs they covered ("California Sun," "Do You Wanna Dance?"). And sure, these are their influences. But, to make this point for the millionth time, the most important influence on punk is The Stooges. The Stooges, who are a "pop band" in no one's conception. And I think it is through this lens that the Ramones need to be seen, to debunk the idea that they are merely latter-day, fucked-up versions of Jan and Dean (why this is an appealing vision I don't know, because it takes all the fun out of the Ramones). And in this conception, "Beat on the Brat" looks a bit different. Isn't this the worst pop song ever?
Ok, so let's define pop music. My definition is that pop music is self-interpreting. On another day, I might say, "pre-digested." I don't mean this negatively, nor do I mean to say that it can't be internally interesting, but if you look at the Beatles' hit songs in their later period, it is still apparent that these songs are, for all their interest, not difficult to hum. "Lady Madonna," "Ballad of John and Yoko," "Obla-di-Obla-da," "Hey Jude." (Here I should say that the all-time worst Beatles hit is the earlier "Paperback Writer.")
The correct point to make, in defending pop music, is all the complexity and variety that can go within a pop song and have it still be self-interpreting. The classic example of this is "Good Vibrations" by the Beach Boys, or, in a later moment, "Love Will Tear Us Apart," by Joy Division. The appeal is, "look how much went into this, and you can still dance to it"--a perfect union of artistry and accessibility.
I don't want to walk all over that, but I think that it has warped everyone's conception of music. For one, I would say that the other essential tenet of pop music is that you throw everything at the wall and see what sticks---this being incompatible with the refinement and genius bands expect from themselves. This, I think, is the motive behind the Buzzcocks' longer album tracks--they are working out one impulse, which will then be "channeled" in a more concise form, into endlessly rewarding pop songs--the same way that Gerhard Richter's split artistic personality was mutually reinforcing to its separate tendencies.
Let's say, then, that we need to get over our fascination with Justin Timberlake and "the perfect pop song" and return to an album context (exactly what has been destroyed by 70-minute rap albums and the prominence of mp3s)--which will have the added benefit of moving away from pure style into a revaluation of form. For instance, instead of trying to graft your Beach Boys harmonies onto your neo-folk ramblings, why not try writing a riff or melody someone might actually want to listen to?
*****
Ok, so after I wrote the first part, I saw this review of an 80s indie-pop retrospective:
"A lot of these bands went in for jingle-jangle 60s-styled pop songs, recorded roughly and sung in starry-eyed schoolkid voices. At times it was defiantly unsexy, and defiantly unambitious-- the sound of idealistic student slackers shambling their way through deliberately simple pop." And this reminds me of when I met kids a few years ago who, when asked what music they listened to, simply said "pop," meaning of course, NOT top 40 stuff. What is hip NOW, I think, is to blur the line (as Pitchfork repeatedly attempts) and say that Toby Keith, The Byrds, and whatever band from Brooklyn are all working in the same idiom, *really*. I find this disingenuous and pretentious, but also wrong-headed. I really stick by my example of "Beat on the Brat," and the Ramones' insistence that they ALL loved the Stooges. As if to prove my point, Pitchfork gives a mediocre review to this collection of the music they are always championing, as if even they can see, when you pile a lot of these singles together, it kind of falls apart on the level of interest.
To forget that the reason the Jesus and Mary Chain are so great is for the same reasons that they AREN'T the Byrds is to fuck everything up.
Well, to conclude very haphazardly, here is a wonderful song which would make a terrible pop song: the opening credits of "The Big Gundown," scored by Ennio Morricone and sung by Audrey Nohra.
This almost could lead to a discussion of "two types of artists": one type capable of writing songs in a variety of formats, and another type that is oriented towards only one thing. So, the Velvet Underground, Wire, Joy Division, The Cure, Fucked Up on one hand, and Black Sabbath, Gang of Four, Motorhead, Pink Floyd, CCR, The Ramones, The Kinks on the other hand.
But that is not an argument I'm really interested in making--since the dichotomy really proves itself: in the division between "variety" and "unity," everything is varied if you look close enough at one level, and everything blends together if you zoom back far enough.
Rather, I would like to point out that everything needn't come down to pop music in the end. This seems to be the logic of the day, when Justin Timberlake is the most universally-beloved artist.
Take the Ramones, for instance. The general take on the Ramones is that they were influenced by Phil Spector pop, the trashy glam-pop of the NY Dolls, and pre-Beatles American pop-rock like the songs they covered ("California Sun," "Do You Wanna Dance?"). And sure, these are their influences. But, to make this point for the millionth time, the most important influence on punk is The Stooges. The Stooges, who are a "pop band" in no one's conception. And I think it is through this lens that the Ramones need to be seen, to debunk the idea that they are merely latter-day, fucked-up versions of Jan and Dean (why this is an appealing vision I don't know, because it takes all the fun out of the Ramones). And in this conception, "Beat on the Brat" looks a bit different. Isn't this the worst pop song ever?
Ok, so let's define pop music. My definition is that pop music is self-interpreting. On another day, I might say, "pre-digested." I don't mean this negatively, nor do I mean to say that it can't be internally interesting, but if you look at the Beatles' hit songs in their later period, it is still apparent that these songs are, for all their interest, not difficult to hum. "Lady Madonna," "Ballad of John and Yoko," "Obla-di-Obla-da," "Hey Jude." (Here I should say that the all-time worst Beatles hit is the earlier "Paperback Writer.")
The correct point to make, in defending pop music, is all the complexity and variety that can go within a pop song and have it still be self-interpreting. The classic example of this is "Good Vibrations" by the Beach Boys, or, in a later moment, "Love Will Tear Us Apart," by Joy Division. The appeal is, "look how much went into this, and you can still dance to it"--a perfect union of artistry and accessibility.
I don't want to walk all over that, but I think that it has warped everyone's conception of music. For one, I would say that the other essential tenet of pop music is that you throw everything at the wall and see what sticks---this being incompatible with the refinement and genius bands expect from themselves. This, I think, is the motive behind the Buzzcocks' longer album tracks--they are working out one impulse, which will then be "channeled" in a more concise form, into endlessly rewarding pop songs--the same way that Gerhard Richter's split artistic personality was mutually reinforcing to its separate tendencies.
Let's say, then, that we need to get over our fascination with Justin Timberlake and "the perfect pop song" and return to an album context (exactly what has been destroyed by 70-minute rap albums and the prominence of mp3s)--which will have the added benefit of moving away from pure style into a revaluation of form. For instance, instead of trying to graft your Beach Boys harmonies onto your neo-folk ramblings, why not try writing a riff or melody someone might actually want to listen to?
*****
Ok, so after I wrote the first part, I saw this review of an 80s indie-pop retrospective:
"A lot of these bands went in for jingle-jangle 60s-styled pop songs, recorded roughly and sung in starry-eyed schoolkid voices. At times it was defiantly unsexy, and defiantly unambitious-- the sound of idealistic student slackers shambling their way through deliberately simple pop." And this reminds me of when I met kids a few years ago who, when asked what music they listened to, simply said "pop," meaning of course, NOT top 40 stuff. What is hip NOW, I think, is to blur the line (as Pitchfork repeatedly attempts) and say that Toby Keith, The Byrds, and whatever band from Brooklyn are all working in the same idiom, *really*. I find this disingenuous and pretentious, but also wrong-headed. I really stick by my example of "Beat on the Brat," and the Ramones' insistence that they ALL loved the Stooges. As if to prove my point, Pitchfork gives a mediocre review to this collection of the music they are always championing, as if even they can see, when you pile a lot of these singles together, it kind of falls apart on the level of interest.
To forget that the reason the Jesus and Mary Chain are so great is for the same reasons that they AREN'T the Byrds is to fuck everything up.
Well, to conclude very haphazardly, here is a wonderful song which would make a terrible pop song: the opening credits of "The Big Gundown," scored by Ennio Morricone and sung by Audrey Nohra.
Wednesday, February 07, 2007
Man, I don't fucking care
I'm all for fine living, but "mixology," "bartenders who are more like actors," following protégés of certain bartenders, and cross-Atlantic competition, reeks of the unspoken-probability that everyone who goes to these bars is a douchebag.
In New York, everything is a cut above, and it's probably true that part of that is a trickle-down from these high-end establishments. It's probably also true that you haven't really had a martini until you've had a $20 one in a place like these, but FUCK ME if there is anything innately classy about bridge-and-tunnelers and thick-necked investment bankers getting trashed. Anyways, this shit can die a slow death or fuck off like all other euro-pretensions: hipster dives and jack-and-coke forever!
see also this description of what sounds like my worst-nightmare (Milk and Honey NYC):
At last - a bar where the post-modern infatuation with stardom and celebrity has been thrown out like so many shattered shards of a Crystal bottle. This hard-to-find gem on Eldridge St is invitation-only and the lucky non-famous who get the nod have to call ahead and get buzzed in through a hi-tech surveillance door. It’s very 007 except the likes of Pierce Brosnan wouldn’t get in - owner Sasha has banned Quentin Tarantino and outlawed all “name-dropping and star-f*****g.” Gorgeous cocktails like blood-orange screwdrivers and strong-mint mojito muddles are expertly prepared by Sasha himself while lucky guests get to take reservation-only booths or stool space at the small five-seat bar. He wields a strong stick does our Sasha: not only is name dropping banned but men cannot introduce themselves to ladies and giving out phone numbers is strictly prohibited. Quirky, classy and just in time.
In New York, everything is a cut above, and it's probably true that part of that is a trickle-down from these high-end establishments. It's probably also true that you haven't really had a martini until you've had a $20 one in a place like these, but FUCK ME if there is anything innately classy about bridge-and-tunnelers and thick-necked investment bankers getting trashed. Anyways, this shit can die a slow death or fuck off like all other euro-pretensions: hipster dives and jack-and-coke forever!
see also this description of what sounds like my worst-nightmare (Milk and Honey NYC):
At last - a bar where the post-modern infatuation with stardom and celebrity has been thrown out like so many shattered shards of a Crystal bottle. This hard-to-find gem on Eldridge St is invitation-only and the lucky non-famous who get the nod have to call ahead and get buzzed in through a hi-tech surveillance door. It’s very 007 except the likes of Pierce Brosnan wouldn’t get in - owner Sasha has banned Quentin Tarantino and outlawed all “name-dropping and star-f*****g.” Gorgeous cocktails like blood-orange screwdrivers and strong-mint mojito muddles are expertly prepared by Sasha himself while lucky guests get to take reservation-only booths or stool space at the small five-seat bar. He wields a strong stick does our Sasha: not only is name dropping banned but men cannot introduce themselves to ladies and giving out phone numbers is strictly prohibited. Quirky, classy and just in time.
Friday, February 02, 2007
Theory and education
There is a blurb from the Village Voice which appears on many of Slavoj Zizek's books: "...the best intellectual high since ANTI-OEDIPUS." This is reprinted in earnest, I suppose, while I think it captures two profound truths. Firstly, Zizek probably IS the most intellectually exciting and stimulating figure on the scene, to the extent that I am qualified to assent to that statement. Secondly, there is something intoxicating, something like getting "high," about reading Zizek--something that baffles straight-forward sense, something unlike normal reading, something--may I say?--addictive.
Here are the points I'll be working with (I've noticed a lot of times, my premise, not my argument, is what people disagree with).
This post has nothing to say about these thinkers, as such. I have read widely in the authors listed above; I like some more than others, I don't think any of them are "nonsense" or disposable; I think their contributions were among the most important intellectual contributions of the last century; and I read them for pleasure (and the pleasure of thinking).
This post is about their reception and use, which I hereby characterize as:
1) largely dillettantish
2) paying insufficient attention to the pre-history of these topics
3) stylistically damaging
4) guilty of "dumb versions" of their theories, and/ or "keywords" readings
5) pretentious and exoticizing
Largely dilettantish: It is an irony to me that the main readers of "theory" are not the expected population, grad students. While my friends and I read *heavily* in theory, in comparison to our other reading, it can only comprise a small portion of our total reading, because, after all, you can't get a PhD in the Theory Department. I think the sort of problems discussed in this post also lead to a dampening of enthusiasm for theory in more mature minds--the "high" wears off. In any case, people who stick with high-level critical thought no longer seem to be fan boys or dilettantes, but you may say they are "seriously engaged." Rather, those who seem to the biggest "fans" of theory are undergraduates and 20-somethings. As for 20-somethings, it is hard to care what they do in New York, in between their "music projects" and gentrifications, but when someone says that THOUSAND PLATEAUS is their "favorite book," it is hard not to snicker. As for undergraduates, the rest of this post will deal with them, but their dilettantism is almost built-in, since no professor is going to assign *all* of THE ORDER OF THINGS to an undergraduate class, but is far more likely to teach exemplary snippets, photocopies into a course-pack. (This is also disastrously true for Karl Marx.)
2) paying insufficient attention to the pre-history of these topics: Derrida, Levinas, Merleau-Ponty, and Sartre all wrote books on Edmund Husserl. Presumably 95% of undergraduate enthusiasts of Derrida have not read Husserl. I know I haven't! After I had read about seven books by Derrida, I opened a book by Heidegger and was floored by how foolish I had been to think that everything Derrida was doing (even stylistically) was new and his innovation, when even the first page of Heidegger's THE WAY TO LANGUAGE is astonishingly proto-Derridean. Not that everyone should read everything in order--but, if one reads Derrida at all, the first thing you notice is that he seems to have read everything. This, of course, would be a different kind of dilettantism, but a more desirable one: a dilettante who has read Husserl.
3) stylistically damaging: I actually wish more people wrote like Zizek and Derrida, who have completely different styles, each of which is all too easy to parody. However, wouldn't that be a
great improvement over the weirdly vocabulary-heavy, distended, humorless prose that undergraduates feel compelled to write in emulation of theory? See here for a perfect (and endlessly-generated) parody/example. [I must admit, I find it very depressing when it is assumed that I write at all in that tedious, name-dropping vein. The only paper I have ever written that involved Heidegger, Derrida, et al, was perfectly lovely and a "lay reader" said it was the best thing I'd ever written. Hi, Dad!]
As for 4) and 5), dumb versions and exoticizing, it is hard to suggest anything about the former, except, "Don't do it!," and the pretentious tendency to uncritically laud anything European is as rampant as the tendency to uncritically dismiss anything European qua pretentious. As for readers of theory who read something and say, "I love it! I'm not sure if I understood it right, though," I can sympathize, but one's time really could be better spent than in being completely mystified by Agamben.
As for my recommendations of how NOT to be a lame reader of theory (ack! that sounds likea title for some dreaded Amazon list), I can only suggest patience and, to quote Derrida, "doing your homework." Zizek *is* a great introduction, but I think he has the potential to be a dead-end for a lot of readers, since he mostly points to Lacan (maybe the "hardest" of the lot). I would suggest starting with Baudrillard (because he has all the most exaggerated qualities imputed to theory) or Foucault, and reading whole books instead of just bits and pieces (or just Wikipedia). I have always said, you probably will get the first 10 or so books you read plain wrong or only partially, but you can always re-read, and once you are in the swing of things, it all is less mystifying. Right now I am reading in the line Kant-->Hegel-->Husserl-->Sartre, and after that I'll probably do Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Heidegger, Deleuze---since I don't "do" theory, I figure I have all the time in the world to get this background---but really you can do no wrong as long as your readings are honest and rigorous.
As for being intimidated by all this, that never got anyone anywhere, and if one is (as is most likely) intimidated by all the BAD versions of the "theory reader," why--all the more reason to get it right. Certainly one doesn't have to engage with these thinkers or their concerns, but they are as valid as the next, and at least raise interesting questions. Never mind how shaky the starting-point is.
Derrida obit in NY times
Guardian obit: "deep thinker or truth thief?"
Here are the points I'll be working with (I've noticed a lot of times, my premise, not my argument, is what people disagree with).
- By "theory," I mean a usually-European, post-1960, left-leaning, esoteric set of critics who write a kind of interdisciplinary philosophy that derives usually from Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, and Heidegger, rather than in the analytic and/or pragmatic philosophy popular in American Universities (hence you can't major in "theory" or usually study these subjects in an American philosophy department).
- Some names: Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Roland Barthes, Jacques Lacan, Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari, Giorgio Agamben, Jean Baudrillard, Guy De Bord, Maurice Blanchot, Slavoj Zizek, Paul Ricoeur, Julia Kristeva, Luce Irigaray, Jean-Luc Nancy, Emmanuel Levinas; and closer to home: Frederic Jameson, Paul De Man, Gayatri Spivak, Judith Butler, Susan Sontag.
- I don't think it is useful or necessary to include a previous generation, although one will see a lot of mentions of: Walter Benjamin, Mikhail Bakhtin, Georg Lukacs, Gaston Bachelard, Theodor Adorno, etc. I say, "Leave them out of this!"
- That these thinkers (Derrida, Lacan, et al.) tend to be classed indiscriminately as post-structuralist, post-modern, etc.
- That much of the reaction against and enthusiasm for these thinkers has much to do with their reputation as subversive writers, whose self-important and inaccessible prose requires much analysis to get to the point of their "abstruse theories," if they aren't just clap-trap.
This post has nothing to say about these thinkers, as such. I have read widely in the authors listed above; I like some more than others, I don't think any of them are "nonsense" or disposable; I think their contributions were among the most important intellectual contributions of the last century; and I read them for pleasure (and the pleasure of thinking).
This post is about their reception and use, which I hereby characterize as:
1) largely dillettantish
2) paying insufficient attention to the pre-history of these topics
3) stylistically damaging
4) guilty of "dumb versions" of their theories, and/ or "keywords" readings
5) pretentious and exoticizing
Largely dilettantish: It is an irony to me that the main readers of "theory" are not the expected population, grad students. While my friends and I read *heavily* in theory, in comparison to our other reading, it can only comprise a small portion of our total reading, because, after all, you can't get a PhD in the Theory Department. I think the sort of problems discussed in this post also lead to a dampening of enthusiasm for theory in more mature minds--the "high" wears off. In any case, people who stick with high-level critical thought no longer seem to be fan boys or dilettantes, but you may say they are "seriously engaged." Rather, those who seem to the biggest "fans" of theory are undergraduates and 20-somethings. As for 20-somethings, it is hard to care what they do in New York, in between their "music projects" and gentrifications, but when someone says that THOUSAND PLATEAUS is their "favorite book," it is hard not to snicker. As for undergraduates, the rest of this post will deal with them, but their dilettantism is almost built-in, since no professor is going to assign *all* of THE ORDER OF THINGS to an undergraduate class, but is far more likely to teach exemplary snippets, photocopies into a course-pack. (This is also disastrously true for Karl Marx.)
2) paying insufficient attention to the pre-history of these topics: Derrida, Levinas, Merleau-Ponty, and Sartre all wrote books on Edmund Husserl. Presumably 95% of undergraduate enthusiasts of Derrida have not read Husserl. I know I haven't! After I had read about seven books by Derrida, I opened a book by Heidegger and was floored by how foolish I had been to think that everything Derrida was doing (even stylistically) was new and his innovation, when even the first page of Heidegger's THE WAY TO LANGUAGE is astonishingly proto-Derridean. Not that everyone should read everything in order--but, if one reads Derrida at all, the first thing you notice is that he seems to have read everything. This, of course, would be a different kind of dilettantism, but a more desirable one: a dilettante who has read Husserl.
3) stylistically damaging: I actually wish more people wrote like Zizek and Derrida, who have completely different styles, each of which is all too easy to parody. However, wouldn't that be a
great improvement over the weirdly vocabulary-heavy, distended, humorless prose that undergraduates feel compelled to write in emulation of theory? See here for a perfect (and endlessly-generated) parody/example. [I must admit, I find it very depressing when it is assumed that I write at all in that tedious, name-dropping vein. The only paper I have ever written that involved Heidegger, Derrida, et al, was perfectly lovely and a "lay reader" said it was the best thing I'd ever written. Hi, Dad!]
As for 4) and 5), dumb versions and exoticizing, it is hard to suggest anything about the former, except, "Don't do it!," and the pretentious tendency to uncritically laud anything European is as rampant as the tendency to uncritically dismiss anything European qua pretentious. As for readers of theory who read something and say, "I love it! I'm not sure if I understood it right, though," I can sympathize, but one's time really could be better spent than in being completely mystified by Agamben.
As for my recommendations of how NOT to be a lame reader of theory (ack! that sounds likea title for some dreaded Amazon list), I can only suggest patience and, to quote Derrida, "doing your homework." Zizek *is* a great introduction, but I think he has the potential to be a dead-end for a lot of readers, since he mostly points to Lacan (maybe the "hardest" of the lot). I would suggest starting with Baudrillard (because he has all the most exaggerated qualities imputed to theory) or Foucault, and reading whole books instead of just bits and pieces (or just Wikipedia). I have always said, you probably will get the first 10 or so books you read plain wrong or only partially, but you can always re-read, and once you are in the swing of things, it all is less mystifying. Right now I am reading in the line Kant-->Hegel-->Husserl-->Sartre, and after that I'll probably do Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Heidegger, Deleuze---since I don't "do" theory, I figure I have all the time in the world to get this background---but really you can do no wrong as long as your readings are honest and rigorous.
As for being intimidated by all this, that never got anyone anywhere, and if one is (as is most likely) intimidated by all the BAD versions of the "theory reader," why--all the more reason to get it right. Certainly one doesn't have to engage with these thinkers or their concerns, but they are as valid as the next, and at least raise interesting questions. Never mind how shaky the starting-point is.
Derrida obit in NY times
Guardian obit: "deep thinker or truth thief?"
Monday, January 29, 2007
My favorite books in high school (part one)
It might be hard to believe for anyone who has seen me lugging around PICKWICK PAPERS lately, but there was a time when I probably would *not* have read a Victorian Novel if you had paid me. When I first came to college, I most wanted to study William S Burroughs and William Faulkner--whereas now I have the vague sense that if I read those authors, I might magically turn into that most disagreeable of creatures, an "Americanist."
William Burroughs: Naked Lunch
To the canny reader, or to the canny attender-of-high-school, this probably seems like it should have a parenthetical admission that I also loved FEAR AND LOATHING IN LAS VEGAS, THE ELECTRIC KOOL-AID ACID TEST, and REQUIEM FOR A DREAM. Well, I've never read those books, so (although I'm sure my parents were terrified that this was the case) I was not a "drug literature" fan, although I probably would have been friends with that kid. I think by the end of this list, you will see that I was nothing so nearly coherent as that. Coherence, which you could almost translate as "predictability," was my motto in college; I wanted everything to fit together into one monolith of perfect taste, each piece accommodating every other one. Well, that is no longer seems a sensible goal, and I am nostalgic for a time when I would have read a bunch of unrelated books in a row and thought nothing of it. In any case, NAKED LUNCH was perfect for me, because it was hilarious and subversive but not particularly upsetting ("dated" is probably the word I'm looking for) to my 17-year old sensibilities. That is, I could read it fairly carelessly, missing or misunderstanding most of the less-savory sexual parts and political context. Maybe I should look at it again, but I'm not sure I would even know what to do with it at the present moment.
Livy: The War with Hannibal
This I relate to a bit more, since Hannibal was Freud's idol, a melancholy figure of ambition thwarted, and Freud relates several dreams that feature Hannibal and his family (Hasdrubal and Hamilcar). Although, not being Tacitus (or Herodotus), Livy is a bit dry, and the most-exciting parts tend to be given the same narrative attention as boring tribunal elections, this is a great story and the magisterial/bureaucratic tone is perfect for Rome's side of the telling. It's broken up by year (the length of the consular term), and extracted from Livy's larger HISTORY OF ROME, but totally stands on its own, with a narrative arc and good guys/villains not dissimilar to PARADISE LOST. Now, in *this* case, one would be correct in assuming that I read a ton of other books in this genre: Tacitus' HISTORIES, Quintus Curtius Rufus' HISTORY OF ALEXANDER, Herodotus, Polybius, etc. Aside from Tacitus, this is probably the best, and it's unfortunate that I will probably never meet anyone who has read this book who isn't the biggest Classical Studies geek.
William S. Shirer: Collapse of the Third Republic
Having read THE RISE AND FALL OF THE THIRD REICH in eighth grade, I naturally had to read its "sequel," which really is a much-expanded version of events from the middle of the earlier book. Like that (equally massive) tome, THE COLLAPSE OF THE THIRD REPUBLIC answers a question: Why was Europe's most powerful country destroyed in a nearly-bloodless war in a matter of a few weeks, after having won The Great War in a brutally long but eventually decisive way? The best parts of this book are the "closet dramas" that Shirer replays from transcripts of cabinet meetings, the interference of mistresses in policy, and the constant threat of Bonapartism to the Republic. Ultimately, it drags a bit, lingering on the politics of the 1930s for a good part of the middle, sandwiched between the long and exhilarating summary of the 1870-1918 period, and the period of Hitler's aggression from 1936. Nonetheless, one can hardly think of a more interesting subject than the complete, abject and sudden collapse of the world's "most civilized" country---unless that subject were the further embarrassment of collaboration and Vichy, about which I would very much like to read.
William Burroughs: Naked Lunch
To the canny reader, or to the canny attender-of-high-school, this probably seems like it should have a parenthetical admission that I also loved FEAR AND LOATHING IN LAS VEGAS, THE ELECTRIC KOOL-AID ACID TEST, and REQUIEM FOR A DREAM. Well, I've never read those books, so (although I'm sure my parents were terrified that this was the case) I was not a "drug literature" fan, although I probably would have been friends with that kid. I think by the end of this list, you will see that I was nothing so nearly coherent as that. Coherence, which you could almost translate as "predictability," was my motto in college; I wanted everything to fit together into one monolith of perfect taste, each piece accommodating every other one. Well, that is no longer seems a sensible goal, and I am nostalgic for a time when I would have read a bunch of unrelated books in a row and thought nothing of it. In any case, NAKED LUNCH was perfect for me, because it was hilarious and subversive but not particularly upsetting ("dated" is probably the word I'm looking for) to my 17-year old sensibilities. That is, I could read it fairly carelessly, missing or misunderstanding most of the less-savory sexual parts and political context. Maybe I should look at it again, but I'm not sure I would even know what to do with it at the present moment.
Livy: The War with Hannibal
This I relate to a bit more, since Hannibal was Freud's idol, a melancholy figure of ambition thwarted, and Freud relates several dreams that feature Hannibal and his family (Hasdrubal and Hamilcar). Although, not being Tacitus (or Herodotus), Livy is a bit dry, and the most-exciting parts tend to be given the same narrative attention as boring tribunal elections, this is a great story and the magisterial/bureaucratic tone is perfect for Rome's side of the telling. It's broken up by year (the length of the consular term), and extracted from Livy's larger HISTORY OF ROME, but totally stands on its own, with a narrative arc and good guys/villains not dissimilar to PARADISE LOST. Now, in *this* case, one would be correct in assuming that I read a ton of other books in this genre: Tacitus' HISTORIES, Quintus Curtius Rufus' HISTORY OF ALEXANDER, Herodotus, Polybius, etc. Aside from Tacitus, this is probably the best, and it's unfortunate that I will probably never meet anyone who has read this book who isn't the biggest Classical Studies geek.
William S. Shirer: Collapse of the Third Republic
Having read THE RISE AND FALL OF THE THIRD REICH in eighth grade, I naturally had to read its "sequel," which really is a much-expanded version of events from the middle of the earlier book. Like that (equally massive) tome, THE COLLAPSE OF THE THIRD REPUBLIC answers a question: Why was Europe's most powerful country destroyed in a nearly-bloodless war in a matter of a few weeks, after having won The Great War in a brutally long but eventually decisive way? The best parts of this book are the "closet dramas" that Shirer replays from transcripts of cabinet meetings, the interference of mistresses in policy, and the constant threat of Bonapartism to the Republic. Ultimately, it drags a bit, lingering on the politics of the 1930s for a good part of the middle, sandwiched between the long and exhilarating summary of the 1870-1918 period, and the period of Hitler's aggression from 1936. Nonetheless, one can hardly think of a more interesting subject than the complete, abject and sudden collapse of the world's "most civilized" country---unless that subject were the further embarrassment of collaboration and Vichy, about which I would very much like to read.
Saturday, January 20, 2007
What are your eleven favorite metal albums, Ben?
Good question.
Sacramentary Abolishment- The Distracting Stone
Darkthrone- Panzerfaust
Mercyful Fate- Don't Break the Oath
Judas Priest- Painkiller
Slayer- Show No Mercy
Celtic Frost- Morbid Tales
Repulsion- Horrified
Graveland- Following the Voice of Blood
Morbid Angel- Altars of Madness
Immortal- Pure Holocaust
Napalm Death- From Enslavement to Obliteration
Sacramentary Abolishment- The Distracting Stone
Darkthrone- Panzerfaust
Mercyful Fate- Don't Break the Oath
Judas Priest- Painkiller
Slayer- Show No Mercy
Celtic Frost- Morbid Tales
Repulsion- Horrified
Graveland- Following the Voice of Blood
Morbid Angel- Altars of Madness
Immortal- Pure Holocaust
Napalm Death- From Enslavement to Obliteration
Wednesday, January 17, 2007
brief outline of demands concerning Iraq
(I know nothing politically/historically about this that was not available in the NY Times--I am an English student. On the other hand, this means I know how to read and dissect arguments fairly well. And that I am less ideologically fixed regarding these issues than a specialist would be.)
I think it would be very interesting to ask a proponent of the Iraq war & occupation a series of questions in which one would "play dumb" and prod each answer that is presented as self-evident with an "and then...?" or "so...?", because everyone must feel that the occupation and ongoing war is being waged on rather shaky principles. So, when someone defends the occupation by saying that "If we left, the region would fall into even further chaos," not only would there need to be an argument about the probability of that event, but (naively) what would be so bad about that?
To demonstrate that we need a single troop in Iraq, to my satisfaction, some combination of the following would have to be shown:
-- that it is morally justifiable to invade and devastate a sovereign country, and then continue to occupy it, as long as you feel bad about the initial invasion. (This, of course, is the premise of a number of film noirs, where someone keeps doing bad things to save their hide, even though they already regret the initial crime. They usually end up badly.)
-- that our military presence in Iraq is or could be anything but a standing insult and open wound to the people of that country
-- that our diplomatic pressure in Iraq can lead to anything but a kind of Vichy collaboration with the occupation (us)
-- that our continuing military presence is reducing the influence of Al Qaeda in Iraq
-- that our continuing military presence is a stabilizing influence in Iraq (this seems to be the main argument--if we leave, everything will fall apart--but, stated in this positive way, it is completely absurd. THE destabilizing force in the region is our military presence. To me this is very obvious), rather than a festering sore.
-- that even a horrible regime arising after our departure would be so much worse than the near-civil-war and bloodshed consuming Iraq now.
-- that there would be a kind of "domino effect" where, if Iraq "fell" (I don't see how this wouldn't already be the case, by the way), then other countries would follow.
-- that the United States is justified in militarily occupying other countries on the basis of a paranoid fantasy that our national security is at stake.
-- that this paranoid fantasy is the real motive, instead of the obviously economic and racist motives.
-- that Arab peoples are barbarians who can't rule themselves without white people around, and who will come to the "wrong" conclusions unless we are there to shepherd them in the right direction.
-- that Iraq ought to become a Jeffersonian democracy
-- that our interests in the region are not wildly inappropriate and imperialist
-- that Iraq ought to remain a single nation
-- that an Iran under the influence of Iran and Syria, et al, would be so awful.
-- that, what people would condemn as "isolationism" in a withdrawal, would not be a noble demonstration of our commitment to anti-aggression and self-determination.
-- that self-determination for Iraq can be achieved with our military there
-- that this ought to remain any of our business; that we haven't "done enough" yet
-- that things will at all improve in the next 3 years than in the past 3, if we "stay the course"
To me, these are the claims of anyone who thinks there should be a SINGLE American/British soldier in Iraq. I find them all highly doubtful and henceforth, I have no moral tolerance for anyone who would advocate our continued presence in Iraq on these grounds--if there are other arguments, I would like to hear them; if I have been mistaken about the validity of these, I would like to see evidence. Otherwise, any argument for "gradual" or delayed withdrawal, much less a "troop surge" or even "staying the course" will simply be posturing in the service of an oppressive and unjustifiable military occupation. Troops out now!--it's not just a sentiment.
As I see it, there would be two (moral and legal) justifications for an American military presence in Iraq, neither of which have been discussed (to my knowledge):
-- the invitation of the Iraqi people for our intervention
-- the approval of the UN (which has repeatedly stressed the opposite--that intervention in Iraq should be regional and multilateral)
And, as far as the probability of either of those events, I won't be holding my breath.
I think it would be very interesting to ask a proponent of the Iraq war & occupation a series of questions in which one would "play dumb" and prod each answer that is presented as self-evident with an "and then...?" or "so...?", because everyone must feel that the occupation and ongoing war is being waged on rather shaky principles. So, when someone defends the occupation by saying that "If we left, the region would fall into even further chaos," not only would there need to be an argument about the probability of that event, but (naively) what would be so bad about that?
To demonstrate that we need a single troop in Iraq, to my satisfaction, some combination of the following would have to be shown:
-- that it is morally justifiable to invade and devastate a sovereign country, and then continue to occupy it, as long as you feel bad about the initial invasion. (This, of course, is the premise of a number of film noirs, where someone keeps doing bad things to save their hide, even though they already regret the initial crime. They usually end up badly.)
-- that our military presence in Iraq is or could be anything but a standing insult and open wound to the people of that country
-- that our diplomatic pressure in Iraq can lead to anything but a kind of Vichy collaboration with the occupation (us)
-- that our continuing military presence is reducing the influence of Al Qaeda in Iraq
-- that our continuing military presence is a stabilizing influence in Iraq (this seems to be the main argument--if we leave, everything will fall apart--but, stated in this positive way, it is completely absurd. THE destabilizing force in the region is our military presence. To me this is very obvious), rather than a festering sore.
-- that even a horrible regime arising after our departure would be so much worse than the near-civil-war and bloodshed consuming Iraq now.
-- that there would be a kind of "domino effect" where, if Iraq "fell" (I don't see how this wouldn't already be the case, by the way), then other countries would follow.
-- that the United States is justified in militarily occupying other countries on the basis of a paranoid fantasy that our national security is at stake.
-- that this paranoid fantasy is the real motive, instead of the obviously economic and racist motives.
-- that Arab peoples are barbarians who can't rule themselves without white people around, and who will come to the "wrong" conclusions unless we are there to shepherd them in the right direction.
-- that Iraq ought to become a Jeffersonian democracy
-- that our interests in the region are not wildly inappropriate and imperialist
-- that Iraq ought to remain a single nation
-- that an Iran under the influence of Iran and Syria, et al, would be so awful.
-- that, what people would condemn as "isolationism" in a withdrawal, would not be a noble demonstration of our commitment to anti-aggression and self-determination.
-- that self-determination for Iraq can be achieved with our military there
-- that this ought to remain any of our business; that we haven't "done enough" yet
-- that things will at all improve in the next 3 years than in the past 3, if we "stay the course"
To me, these are the claims of anyone who thinks there should be a SINGLE American/British soldier in Iraq. I find them all highly doubtful and henceforth, I have no moral tolerance for anyone who would advocate our continued presence in Iraq on these grounds--if there are other arguments, I would like to hear them; if I have been mistaken about the validity of these, I would like to see evidence. Otherwise, any argument for "gradual" or delayed withdrawal, much less a "troop surge" or even "staying the course" will simply be posturing in the service of an oppressive and unjustifiable military occupation. Troops out now!--it's not just a sentiment.
As I see it, there would be two (moral and legal) justifications for an American military presence in Iraq, neither of which have been discussed (to my knowledge):
-- the invitation of the Iraqi people for our intervention
-- the approval of the UN (which has repeatedly stressed the opposite--that intervention in Iraq should be regional and multilateral)
And, as far as the probability of either of those events, I won't be holding my breath.
Monday, January 15, 2007
Highlights of Bush appearance on 60 Minutes
-- Suggesting that, instead of criticizing the performance of the military, people should criticize him instead. "If the people want a scapegoat, they got one right here in me, cuz it's my decisions" [sic]. Wow, ok, thanks for the pointer--now we'll start criticizing Bush.
-- "I think the Iraqi people owe the American people a huge debt of gratitude."
-- "People are discouraged, they don't apprecia--they don't approve of where we are."
-- The reporter describes how, in the presidential helicopter, Bush points out "the Washington monument and other landmarks along Pennsylvania avenue."
-- Something I didn't know--Bush personally signs every letter informing families that they now have a corpse in the family--this in contradistinction to Lyndon Johnson, of whom it might reasonably have been asked if he did know how many were killed that day. On the other hand, I wonder what is going through his head, then, every morning while doing this.
-- Reporter: "You're not very popular, to be frank, in the country. Does that bother you?" Bush: "Not really."
-- "The minute we found out there weren't weapons of mass destruction, I was the first to tell the people so." This reminds me of that Onion headline, "Barry Bonds Did Steroids, Reports Everyone Who Has Ever Watched Baseball," with an accompanying photo of Barry Bonds under the words: "NO SHIT-- An Onion Special Report on Barry Bonds and Steroids." As Bush puts it, "I was as surprised as anybody that they didn't have them."
-- When he trots out the Domino Theory for the middle east, as if this were an original or credible idea.
-- Admits that the current instability in Iraq stems from "decisions." As in the sentence, "No doubt, decisions have made things unstable." This is a new tactic I would like to apply to all things that go poorly, as if "decisions" were an uncontrollable deus ex machina.
********************************
My characterization of mainstream politics, since I was probably 16, has been that of an unamusing fantasy which obnoxiously interferes with everyday life, and yet that some people mind-boggingly take seriously. To me, there is no reason why George Bush should be treated any differently than Hulk Hogan (PLEASE NOTE THAT I AM BEING IRONICAL)-- someone whose appearance on TV is good for nothing better than a highlight reel of idiotic pronouncements and a failure to understand that he is a joke.
The problem with American politics (here it comes) is that anyone takes it seriously--that all of the horrors perpetrated by the American military and those whom we support, all of the blunders, the lies, the shameless waste of money and lives in war, our endorsement of the worst regimes around the globe, rampant indulgence of Protestant doctrine, etc.--not that it all happens, but that it is "spun" and glossed over and defended and debated SO BADLY. Although Chomsky has written extensively about "thought control in Democratic societies," it is still mind-blowing to watch the rhetoric in action and see how inarticulate and bafflingly stupid it can be--which is to say, how amazing that this ever worked on us. This is the supreme accomplishment of thought control (although I'm sure someone else must have pointed this out)--that as a nation we could be led by, and re-elect, and quarrel with (but never overthrow or discredit) a moron like Bush.
To be plain: We have gotten the president we deserve. If this man was able to "deceive" us, how fucking stupid are we?
How stupid is the "politics" (I mean mainstream Washington-centric debates about what goes on on either side of "the aisle") which debates and rationalizes and researches and interrogates and votes on these discussions, as if on an equal footing? How tragic that we have put our military at his beck and call, and seem unable to effect a halt in the pouring of soldiers into Iraq? When I compared Bush to Hulk Hogan earlier, I wanted to stress how pathetic it is that any intelligent mind should "grapple" with Bush ideologically--any reasonable, dignified person would object to even be in the same room with this man--if I were a member of congress, I would resign in humiliation at the impotence of my office and the stupidity of it all.
BUT, it is not enough that this man is a joke, because of course he is a dangerous joke. On one hand, he shows that mechanisms of power function so incredibly well that "even" he could be president and, despite some bumpiness, get re-elected and continue to have credibility in the media/washington/the midwest. It is like that horrible movie where Kevin Klein mistakenly becomes president ("Dave": tagline, "In a country where anybody can become President, anybody just did."), only with less happy results.
So, what I want to suggest is:
1) The position of "holder of sovereign power" is empty, a null set.*
2) That of course Bush doesn't know this; hence his wild celebration of his apparent power.
3) That Bush, as the nadir of intelligence, dignity and charisma, is a sick joke we have inflicted upon ourselves to demonstrate point 1).
4) That any opposition which indulges in the fantasy I have been describing, is not worth its name.
(*--I find it extremely difficult to believe what (tellingly) many people want me to think, that Bush is a "madman" and that (as he would have us believe) he should be the scapegoat for all this. Doesn't it disturb you that the opposition and Bush are telling us the same thing---"Blame it on me, ignore all the history and all the drives and motives which have gotten us here?" It disturbs me.)
-- "I think the Iraqi people owe the American people a huge debt of gratitude."
-- "People are discouraged, they don't apprecia--they don't approve of where we are."
-- The reporter describes how, in the presidential helicopter, Bush points out "the Washington monument and other landmarks along Pennsylvania avenue."
-- Something I didn't know--Bush personally signs every letter informing families that they now have a corpse in the family--this in contradistinction to Lyndon Johnson, of whom it might reasonably have been asked if he did know how many were killed that day. On the other hand, I wonder what is going through his head, then, every morning while doing this.
-- Reporter: "You're not very popular, to be frank, in the country. Does that bother you?" Bush: "Not really."
-- "The minute we found out there weren't weapons of mass destruction, I was the first to tell the people so." This reminds me of that Onion headline, "Barry Bonds Did Steroids, Reports Everyone Who Has Ever Watched Baseball," with an accompanying photo of Barry Bonds under the words: "NO SHIT-- An Onion Special Report on Barry Bonds and Steroids." As Bush puts it, "I was as surprised as anybody that they didn't have them."
-- When he trots out the Domino Theory for the middle east, as if this were an original or credible idea.
-- Admits that the current instability in Iraq stems from "decisions." As in the sentence, "No doubt, decisions have made things unstable." This is a new tactic I would like to apply to all things that go poorly, as if "decisions" were an uncontrollable deus ex machina.
********************************
My characterization of mainstream politics, since I was probably 16, has been that of an unamusing fantasy which obnoxiously interferes with everyday life, and yet that some people mind-boggingly take seriously. To me, there is no reason why George Bush should be treated any differently than Hulk Hogan (PLEASE NOTE THAT I AM BEING IRONICAL)-- someone whose appearance on TV is good for nothing better than a highlight reel of idiotic pronouncements and a failure to understand that he is a joke.
The problem with American politics (here it comes) is that anyone takes it seriously--that all of the horrors perpetrated by the American military and those whom we support, all of the blunders, the lies, the shameless waste of money and lives in war, our endorsement of the worst regimes around the globe, rampant indulgence of Protestant doctrine, etc.--not that it all happens, but that it is "spun" and glossed over and defended and debated SO BADLY. Although Chomsky has written extensively about "thought control in Democratic societies," it is still mind-blowing to watch the rhetoric in action and see how inarticulate and bafflingly stupid it can be--which is to say, how amazing that this ever worked on us. This is the supreme accomplishment of thought control (although I'm sure someone else must have pointed this out)--that as a nation we could be led by, and re-elect, and quarrel with (but never overthrow or discredit) a moron like Bush.
To be plain: We have gotten the president we deserve. If this man was able to "deceive" us, how fucking stupid are we?
How stupid is the "politics" (I mean mainstream Washington-centric debates about what goes on on either side of "the aisle") which debates and rationalizes and researches and interrogates and votes on these discussions, as if on an equal footing? How tragic that we have put our military at his beck and call, and seem unable to effect a halt in the pouring of soldiers into Iraq? When I compared Bush to Hulk Hogan earlier, I wanted to stress how pathetic it is that any intelligent mind should "grapple" with Bush ideologically--any reasonable, dignified person would object to even be in the same room with this man--if I were a member of congress, I would resign in humiliation at the impotence of my office and the stupidity of it all.
BUT, it is not enough that this man is a joke, because of course he is a dangerous joke. On one hand, he shows that mechanisms of power function so incredibly well that "even" he could be president and, despite some bumpiness, get re-elected and continue to have credibility in the media/washington/the midwest. It is like that horrible movie where Kevin Klein mistakenly becomes president ("Dave": tagline, "In a country where anybody can become President, anybody just did."), only with less happy results.
So, what I want to suggest is:
1) The position of "holder of sovereign power" is empty, a null set.*
2) That of course Bush doesn't know this; hence his wild celebration of his apparent power.
3) That Bush, as the nadir of intelligence, dignity and charisma, is a sick joke we have inflicted upon ourselves to demonstrate point 1).
4) That any opposition which indulges in the fantasy I have been describing, is not worth its name.
(*--I find it extremely difficult to believe what (tellingly) many people want me to think, that Bush is a "madman" and that (as he would have us believe) he should be the scapegoat for all this. Doesn't it disturb you that the opposition and Bush are telling us the same thing---"Blame it on me, ignore all the history and all the drives and motives which have gotten us here?" It disturbs me.)
Friday, January 12, 2007
Favorite Quote of the Year
I'm more or less paraphrasing, and I won't give my source, so that no one is embarrassed, but I have to say, this sums up a great number of interactions I have with people, and certainly captures the idiocy of many of the anonymous comments on this very blog. Everyone is free, of course, to leave snarky anonymous posts: but remember, idiocy is truly its own reward.
Before I get to my quote (which will, I assure you, be a letdown), an anecdote. When you are biking on the one-way avenues in Manhattan, you will notice a curious thing that people do in midtown, while they are crossing the street: they look the other direction, as if they were checking traffic, but in fact turning their heads away from traffic to check that "the coast is clear" from a direction where no traffic conceivably could be coming. If I may extend this into an analogy, this is the aim of the kind of moronic readings which are so prevalent today--and which this little corner of the earth, this blog, is also subject to. For, this style of reading, which looks the other direction, acts as if it were arguing with me, but rather than dismantling my argument logically--or even anecdotally--such readings appear to have no comprehension of even the general drift of my claims, instead preferring to ad hominem attacks, or fixating on aspects of my argument which they see as "faults," without then reading the next sentence which explains or admits this, or making wild assumptions about my argument without any familiarity with it at all--but a great familiarity in tone!
Anyways, I don't take it personally--and certainly I am not the only person who is thus besieged by incomprehension. But I don't see why anyone would waste their time flailing about arguments which I have, in fact, never made. Why even go through the pretense of grappling with my opinions, if you disregard their substance?! Why not just invent them! And then you could argue with an invented argument of mine, in the privacy of your own home, without presenting me with such distortions, and wasting both of our time.
Anyways, here's the quote, and if it is a bit late for a new year's resolution, the resolution which everyone should have this year is: READ MORE CLOSELY. without further ado, my favorite quote of last year:
If that is what you think I am saying, how stupid must you think I am? At least, more stupid than you.
I have a favorite personal application of this in my life right now, but it is ongoing, so I won't disclose the person it would refer to, but suffice it to say, sometimes I wonder, because I don't imagine anyone thinks that I am (unqualifiedly) a moron--although I'm sure there are people out there nodding to themselves, and saying, "Not a moron at school, but surely Ben has no clue about certain intangibles--things you can't learn in school!", to which I could only nod MY head and say, again, how completely you have missed the point of everything I am saying. Again, really this time, though--idiocy is its own reward.
And no, dear reader, none of this applies to you.
Before I get to my quote (which will, I assure you, be a letdown), an anecdote. When you are biking on the one-way avenues in Manhattan, you will notice a curious thing that people do in midtown, while they are crossing the street: they look the other direction, as if they were checking traffic, but in fact turning their heads away from traffic to check that "the coast is clear" from a direction where no traffic conceivably could be coming. If I may extend this into an analogy, this is the aim of the kind of moronic readings which are so prevalent today--and which this little corner of the earth, this blog, is also subject to. For, this style of reading, which looks the other direction, acts as if it were arguing with me, but rather than dismantling my argument logically--or even anecdotally--such readings appear to have no comprehension of even the general drift of my claims, instead preferring to ad hominem attacks, or fixating on aspects of my argument which they see as "faults," without then reading the next sentence which explains or admits this, or making wild assumptions about my argument without any familiarity with it at all--but a great familiarity in tone!
Anyways, I don't take it personally--and certainly I am not the only person who is thus besieged by incomprehension. But I don't see why anyone would waste their time flailing about arguments which I have, in fact, never made. Why even go through the pretense of grappling with my opinions, if you disregard their substance?! Why not just invent them! And then you could argue with an invented argument of mine, in the privacy of your own home, without presenting me with such distortions, and wasting both of our time.
Anyways, here's the quote, and if it is a bit late for a new year's resolution, the resolution which everyone should have this year is: READ MORE CLOSELY. without further ado, my favorite quote of last year:
If that is what you think I am saying, how stupid must you think I am? At least, more stupid than you.
I have a favorite personal application of this in my life right now, but it is ongoing, so I won't disclose the person it would refer to, but suffice it to say, sometimes I wonder, because I don't imagine anyone thinks that I am (unqualifiedly) a moron--although I'm sure there are people out there nodding to themselves, and saying, "Not a moron at school, but surely Ben has no clue about certain intangibles--things you can't learn in school!", to which I could only nod MY head and say, again, how completely you have missed the point of everything I am saying. Again, really this time, though--idiocy is its own reward.
And no, dear reader, none of this applies to you.
Tuesday, January 09, 2007
Five Favorite Movies of 2006
MRR "Public Safety" compilation LP
I have been excited about this record since long before it came out, since I was visiting my friends at Maximum during some of the early planning stages. Of course, a number of my fantasies about the lineup did not come to pass–unsurprisingly, no Gauze, no Fucked Up, no Tragedy, no Lebenden Toten. On the other hand, the absence of such bands was exactly what made Welcome to 1984 (to which this is a kind of sequel) such a success: no Dead Kennedys, no Anti Cimex, no Poison Idea, no MDC, etc. On yet another hand, however, I must admit: this is no Welcome to 1984. I can’t even imagine punk without songs like “No SS” or “Fuck Authority,” and plainly nothing on Public Safety will make that kind of impression. And what amazes about Welcome to 1984 is that each time you listen to it, you can almost discover a new favorite band: sure, we all know the Stalin and BGK, but the Skjit-Lars and Depression songs are just as good, and of course we all remember the UBR Mania of the early 2000s. Also available for comparison are recent compilations like Lengua Armada’s Histeria series, Iron Columns, and the Crust War Konton Damaging Ear Massacre album.
So, here’s my review: as an album, this doesn’t work. I am glad to have a lot of these songs, and some I can deal with, and some I could do without, but I see no reason why they were all thrown together, and I am thankful to my itunes for letting me reconfigure these tracks as I please and leave out what I will. Unlike Welcome to 1984, which is so nearly perfect that there isn’t even the less memorable tracks at the end are totally worthwhile, or the Crust War comp, which is less essential but extremely consistent, Public Safety has about seven songs that I would have cut, eleven songs I really like, and eight that are just ok. Clearly the logic in ordering the songs was to intersperse the winners with the duds, so that we will listen to the whole thing. This strikes me as weirdly puritanical–why shouldn’t I be able to eat dessert and skip my vegetables? Or, to reverse this analogy, why should I have to wade through insubstantial fluff to get to the delicious nutrient-filled vegetables?
The album begins promisingly, with a Formaldehyde Junkies track which sounds like it could have been on Welcome to 1984–or more precisely, Flex Your Head, since the vocalist sounds just like John Stabb from Government Issue. It’s quirky and catchy, and you have to love any song that only waits eight seconds before going into a guitar solo. This is followed by the long-awaited new Framtid song, which is a monster, although I have no idea what the uninitiated will think of it–write it off as standard Scandi-crust, or abusive noise, or maybe see it as the devastating behemoth it is? I have to say, in isolation, Framtid sound very strange, since their greatness in part comes from their refinement of a specific set of influences, and in part from genius songwriting partially obscured by their devastating sound.
Then, the album comes to a virtual standstill during the Strung Up song, which is like a bad clone (pun intended) of Caustic Christ, with vocals that are unfortunately intelligible (rhyming “bitch” with “rich”), obnoxiously dumb riffs, mandatory you’ve-heard-it-all-before intro and bridge, and no attempt at a hook. I can just see these guys at practice blowing themselves away at the idea of singing along with the guitar and having multiple parts to a song. Ugh. Next is the weirdest song, “Cotton Fields” by Spanish band Disease–whom I know as a Poison Idea-ish band, but I can’t shake the idea that this is supposed to be a Leadbelly cover, since the chorus is “In those cotton fields back home.” I checked the lyric sheet, which only confused me more, since it has about three verses which do not appear in the song. Anyways, this doesn’t at all sound like Poison Idea OR Leadbelly, and is exactly the out-of-left-field-mix-tape-hit that makes a good comp. After this is No Hope for the Kids, who I think are overrated, an opinion confirmed by this serviceable but muddy and low-energy track, which seems to be in search of a hook.
The Regulations are a band I still haven’t made up my mind about–it seems like I like about half of their records (their second EP and the self-titled 12"), and even though this song is only 1:30 long, the word “Stop” is uttered twenty-seven times. I suppose there are worse words, and I’m glad to see this band has moved on from the word “problems” on which they were previously fixated, but this song doesn’t do much for me. However, I like the style it’s in, and an album of similar songs (if less repetitive) would conceivably be quite good. The same can also be said of the Limp Wrist song. Surely this will not be the first or last punk song about something fucking with your head, and the song doesn’t make much of an impression, but my criticism would be more that this was not a suitable choice for a comp, where a band really ought to stand out. Next is the Direct Control song, after which the entire comp is titled, and this really lives up to the bar set by NOTA on Welcome to 1984's “Propaganda Control”–I would make a snarky comment like, “Strung Up should take notes,” but these two bands have toured together and even put out a split record, so obviously Strung Up have already declined to take notes. Anyways, although stylistically similar, Direct Control hand Strung Up their asses on this comp.
Persevere are an example of that strange (but not uncommon) phenomenon of an excellent Japanese band that, for some reason, no one else cares about. While perhaps not as great as Laukaus or the Addiction, Persevere have the same squirmy catchiness–once people move on from “Myspace Crust,” hopefully these bands will be their next stop. Anyways, their song is predictably great. Signal Lost are another band overlooked by tastemakers, although part of that must be that their records pale next to their live set. This recording doesn’t do them any favors in that area, because this has to be the worst-produced track on the album. It’s just hard to hear! Which is a shame, because (as always) the song-writing is top notch, and this is one of their best recent songs. Had this been recorded HUGE the way it deserves, it would have been one of the best songs on here; as it is, I can only look forward to hearing it live. Also, who in this band is reading Heidegger?
The Pedestrians song is better than I remember them being, with some neat parts, while I kind of can’t believe that the chorus to Sleeper Cell’s song is “Blind from the fear.” What a fucking tired cliché. Then, I had to laugh at Deadfall’s lyrics, which rhyme “into the fray” with “protegé.” That’s funny! Bravo, guys. Oh, but your song sucks.
The Nightmare song starts off side B, and it is wild! What is weird about this band is that they ditched the much-derided saxophone player, but their newer records all have this crazy, squealing guitar noise laid on top of everything, as if they still want a bunch of wild squeaks everywhere in the mix. I think that’s cool, because everyone is like, “Oh, I’m so glad there is no saxophone anymore,” but then there might as well be. This song also wins “best guitar solo” award for the comp. Look Back and Laugh have one of the best drummers in hardcore, and their song vies with Framtid in terms of sheer leveling-power, but unlike Framtid, LBAL haven’t really mastered hooks yet, and I can’t tell this song apart from any number of their other songs. This band’s best material remains their most recent 7", but sometimes I wonder if they will ever get beyond turning their amps to 11 and bulldozing the audience. The Ääratila song is over before it starts, but (along with Nightmare) is a perfect example of hardcore veterans schooling younger bands–in barely over a minute, they do everything they need, it’s catchy, it sounds cool, there’s a guitar solo, blah blah–they are geniuses.
The Observers song is ok, I have always thought the vocalist for this band, by trying to sing everything, just sounds like Christina Aguilera, and all their songs sound the same. Honestly, I am not entirely convinced that this song isn’t on one of their other records, but I checked and at least the title is new. The Sunday Morning Einsteins turn out a good song, which makes me think I should go back and listen to their new album. According to the liner notes, it has a “7 Seconds-style chrous” to offset the negative lyrics, but now I wonder if they have ever heard 7 Seconds. Holy Shit’s song is awesome, although this band creeps me the fuck out, and I hated them live. It’s called, “We’re Going Out and It Sucks,” and it sounds like they improvised the whole thing. I can’t really review the Gorilla Angreb song, because it seems like a joke at my expense, down to the dude on the right channel singing (what sounds like) “duh duh duh duh” in a ridiculous low-voice during the chorus. They do have the coolest band photo, though.
In theory, I like the Regress song, but since it is about drafting Ivy League kids to fight wars, maybe I shouldn’t. But for real, their guitar tone is just amazing, although if you listen very close, it’s uncertain whether the drummer can even play! What is he doing?! The First Step are a boring straight-edge band, but actually their song grows on me with every listen. They obviously have done their homework, and thankfully it is not that new-fangled faux-hipster straight-edge style like Righteous Jams–just a bunch of uglies wearing khakis and living in Connecticut (probably–if not, they should get working on that).
Career Suicide put out too many records and sort of lost my interest, but I still count them as one of my favorite current bands, and having just one song to go through here, instead of a whole slew, reminds me why they are so great. This song is maybe a bit busy, but it’s great, and it’s hardcore, instead of (what would have been the easy way out) a slower KBD “rager” with angsty lyrics–I guess Regulations have cornered that market.
The Smalltown song is easily the best song on here, and anyone who knows me knows that I’m not just saying that because it is the most poppy and most legible song. In fact, I really don’t even like this band, but this reminds me of the Replacements “Bastards of Young,” and the vocalist really sells lyrics like, “I don’t know any reason for me to go on; tell me, who can I count on?”--which, as poetry, suck, but here it works. There’s no point reviewing this song, because all I can say is it is catchy, catchy, catchy, and you won’t believe me until you hear it, or care what I think once you have.
Smartut Kahol Lavan’s 7" didn’t impress me, and neither does this track, really, but I have to give the vocalist credit for sounding *exactly* like Steve from 9 Shocks Terror. Sin Dios don’t really close the album on an interesting note: their song is overlong, weak, and kind of jammy. Further, I’m not sure I even agree with their politics–the song is called “Iraq,” and it celebrates “Armed uprisings against the English, / How they threw out the puppet king, / of how Iraq was forged from these battles.” I find that to be weirdly nationalistic, and it is perhaps no coincidence that the song has no idea what to do with the 24 years of Hussein’s secular, nationalist rule. “Onward, people of Iraq” seems to me an unhelpful and even misguided propaganda, to the degree that the “Iraq forged from these battles” was by no means universal and inclusive. Whatever, it’s a punk song, and the sentiment is in the right place, but the political situation is so much more complex than, “Steadfast, until we throw them into the sea,” because–what then?
So, both sides separately run out of steam, the B-side is overall weaker, and most of the American bands are disappointing. The five best songs are by Smalltown, Direct Control, Framtid, Nightmare, and the Pedestrians, followed by a pack of less distinct but still strong hardcore songs. The worst songs are by Strung Up, Deadfall, Sleeper Cell, and the Observers. I would add to that, Gorilla Angreb, but it would ruin my claim that all the worst songs are by American bands, and also I plainly made no effort to get into the Gorilla Angreb song, so it isn’t “bad” in the same way. There’s no point speculating on why bands like Criminal Damage or Human Bastard aren’t on here–but my overall complaint is, there are so many great bands out there, that even allowing for differences in taste, the difficulty of getting all the tracks on time, the requirement that all songs be new and unreleased, and the peculiar vortices of taste operating on the MRR staff, there is simply no excuse for filler. For instance, there was no need for there to be FOUR bands from the Bay Area on here, especially when none of those of those songs are great, and Welcome to 1984 had zero. I had high hopes for this, and it has its moments, but I don’t think it lives up to its potential. To end this review on a high note, though, I love the essay on the back cover, which is perfectly constructed and unembarrassedly enthusiastic.
So, here’s my review: as an album, this doesn’t work. I am glad to have a lot of these songs, and some I can deal with, and some I could do without, but I see no reason why they were all thrown together, and I am thankful to my itunes for letting me reconfigure these tracks as I please and leave out what I will. Unlike Welcome to 1984, which is so nearly perfect that there isn’t even the less memorable tracks at the end are totally worthwhile, or the Crust War comp, which is less essential but extremely consistent, Public Safety has about seven songs that I would have cut, eleven songs I really like, and eight that are just ok. Clearly the logic in ordering the songs was to intersperse the winners with the duds, so that we will listen to the whole thing. This strikes me as weirdly puritanical–why shouldn’t I be able to eat dessert and skip my vegetables? Or, to reverse this analogy, why should I have to wade through insubstantial fluff to get to the delicious nutrient-filled vegetables?
The album begins promisingly, with a Formaldehyde Junkies track which sounds like it could have been on Welcome to 1984–or more precisely, Flex Your Head, since the vocalist sounds just like John Stabb from Government Issue. It’s quirky and catchy, and you have to love any song that only waits eight seconds before going into a guitar solo. This is followed by the long-awaited new Framtid song, which is a monster, although I have no idea what the uninitiated will think of it–write it off as standard Scandi-crust, or abusive noise, or maybe see it as the devastating behemoth it is? I have to say, in isolation, Framtid sound very strange, since their greatness in part comes from their refinement of a specific set of influences, and in part from genius songwriting partially obscured by their devastating sound.
Then, the album comes to a virtual standstill during the Strung Up song, which is like a bad clone (pun intended) of Caustic Christ, with vocals that are unfortunately intelligible (rhyming “bitch” with “rich”), obnoxiously dumb riffs, mandatory you’ve-heard-it-all-before intro and bridge, and no attempt at a hook. I can just see these guys at practice blowing themselves away at the idea of singing along with the guitar and having multiple parts to a song. Ugh. Next is the weirdest song, “Cotton Fields” by Spanish band Disease–whom I know as a Poison Idea-ish band, but I can’t shake the idea that this is supposed to be a Leadbelly cover, since the chorus is “In those cotton fields back home.” I checked the lyric sheet, which only confused me more, since it has about three verses which do not appear in the song. Anyways, this doesn’t at all sound like Poison Idea OR Leadbelly, and is exactly the out-of-left-field-mix-tape-hit that makes a good comp. After this is No Hope for the Kids, who I think are overrated, an opinion confirmed by this serviceable but muddy and low-energy track, which seems to be in search of a hook.
The Regulations are a band I still haven’t made up my mind about–it seems like I like about half of their records (their second EP and the self-titled 12"), and even though this song is only 1:30 long, the word “Stop” is uttered twenty-seven times. I suppose there are worse words, and I’m glad to see this band has moved on from the word “problems” on which they were previously fixated, but this song doesn’t do much for me. However, I like the style it’s in, and an album of similar songs (if less repetitive) would conceivably be quite good. The same can also be said of the Limp Wrist song. Surely this will not be the first or last punk song about something fucking with your head, and the song doesn’t make much of an impression, but my criticism would be more that this was not a suitable choice for a comp, where a band really ought to stand out. Next is the Direct Control song, after which the entire comp is titled, and this really lives up to the bar set by NOTA on Welcome to 1984's “Propaganda Control”–I would make a snarky comment like, “Strung Up should take notes,” but these two bands have toured together and even put out a split record, so obviously Strung Up have already declined to take notes. Anyways, although stylistically similar, Direct Control hand Strung Up their asses on this comp.
Persevere are an example of that strange (but not uncommon) phenomenon of an excellent Japanese band that, for some reason, no one else cares about. While perhaps not as great as Laukaus or the Addiction, Persevere have the same squirmy catchiness–once people move on from “Myspace Crust,” hopefully these bands will be their next stop. Anyways, their song is predictably great. Signal Lost are another band overlooked by tastemakers, although part of that must be that their records pale next to their live set. This recording doesn’t do them any favors in that area, because this has to be the worst-produced track on the album. It’s just hard to hear! Which is a shame, because (as always) the song-writing is top notch, and this is one of their best recent songs. Had this been recorded HUGE the way it deserves, it would have been one of the best songs on here; as it is, I can only look forward to hearing it live. Also, who in this band is reading Heidegger?
The Pedestrians song is better than I remember them being, with some neat parts, while I kind of can’t believe that the chorus to Sleeper Cell’s song is “Blind from the fear.” What a fucking tired cliché. Then, I had to laugh at Deadfall’s lyrics, which rhyme “into the fray” with “protegé.” That’s funny! Bravo, guys. Oh, but your song sucks.
The Nightmare song starts off side B, and it is wild! What is weird about this band is that they ditched the much-derided saxophone player, but their newer records all have this crazy, squealing guitar noise laid on top of everything, as if they still want a bunch of wild squeaks everywhere in the mix. I think that’s cool, because everyone is like, “Oh, I’m so glad there is no saxophone anymore,” but then there might as well be. This song also wins “best guitar solo” award for the comp. Look Back and Laugh have one of the best drummers in hardcore, and their song vies with Framtid in terms of sheer leveling-power, but unlike Framtid, LBAL haven’t really mastered hooks yet, and I can’t tell this song apart from any number of their other songs. This band’s best material remains their most recent 7", but sometimes I wonder if they will ever get beyond turning their amps to 11 and bulldozing the audience. The Ääratila song is over before it starts, but (along with Nightmare) is a perfect example of hardcore veterans schooling younger bands–in barely over a minute, they do everything they need, it’s catchy, it sounds cool, there’s a guitar solo, blah blah–they are geniuses.
The Observers song is ok, I have always thought the vocalist for this band, by trying to sing everything, just sounds like Christina Aguilera, and all their songs sound the same. Honestly, I am not entirely convinced that this song isn’t on one of their other records, but I checked and at least the title is new. The Sunday Morning Einsteins turn out a good song, which makes me think I should go back and listen to their new album. According to the liner notes, it has a “7 Seconds-style chrous” to offset the negative lyrics, but now I wonder if they have ever heard 7 Seconds. Holy Shit’s song is awesome, although this band creeps me the fuck out, and I hated them live. It’s called, “We’re Going Out and It Sucks,” and it sounds like they improvised the whole thing. I can’t really review the Gorilla Angreb song, because it seems like a joke at my expense, down to the dude on the right channel singing (what sounds like) “duh duh duh duh” in a ridiculous low-voice during the chorus. They do have the coolest band photo, though.
In theory, I like the Regress song, but since it is about drafting Ivy League kids to fight wars, maybe I shouldn’t. But for real, their guitar tone is just amazing, although if you listen very close, it’s uncertain whether the drummer can even play! What is he doing?! The First Step are a boring straight-edge band, but actually their song grows on me with every listen. They obviously have done their homework, and thankfully it is not that new-fangled faux-hipster straight-edge style like Righteous Jams–just a bunch of uglies wearing khakis and living in Connecticut (probably–if not, they should get working on that).
Career Suicide put out too many records and sort of lost my interest, but I still count them as one of my favorite current bands, and having just one song to go through here, instead of a whole slew, reminds me why they are so great. This song is maybe a bit busy, but it’s great, and it’s hardcore, instead of (what would have been the easy way out) a slower KBD “rager” with angsty lyrics–I guess Regulations have cornered that market.
The Smalltown song is easily the best song on here, and anyone who knows me knows that I’m not just saying that because it is the most poppy and most legible song. In fact, I really don’t even like this band, but this reminds me of the Replacements “Bastards of Young,” and the vocalist really sells lyrics like, “I don’t know any reason for me to go on; tell me, who can I count on?”--which, as poetry, suck, but here it works. There’s no point reviewing this song, because all I can say is it is catchy, catchy, catchy, and you won’t believe me until you hear it, or care what I think once you have.
Smartut Kahol Lavan’s 7" didn’t impress me, and neither does this track, really, but I have to give the vocalist credit for sounding *exactly* like Steve from 9 Shocks Terror. Sin Dios don’t really close the album on an interesting note: their song is overlong, weak, and kind of jammy. Further, I’m not sure I even agree with their politics–the song is called “Iraq,” and it celebrates “Armed uprisings against the English, / How they threw out the puppet king, / of how Iraq was forged from these battles.” I find that to be weirdly nationalistic, and it is perhaps no coincidence that the song has no idea what to do with the 24 years of Hussein’s secular, nationalist rule. “Onward, people of Iraq” seems to me an unhelpful and even misguided propaganda, to the degree that the “Iraq forged from these battles” was by no means universal and inclusive. Whatever, it’s a punk song, and the sentiment is in the right place, but the political situation is so much more complex than, “Steadfast, until we throw them into the sea,” because–what then?
So, both sides separately run out of steam, the B-side is overall weaker, and most of the American bands are disappointing. The five best songs are by Smalltown, Direct Control, Framtid, Nightmare, and the Pedestrians, followed by a pack of less distinct but still strong hardcore songs. The worst songs are by Strung Up, Deadfall, Sleeper Cell, and the Observers. I would add to that, Gorilla Angreb, but it would ruin my claim that all the worst songs are by American bands, and also I plainly made no effort to get into the Gorilla Angreb song, so it isn’t “bad” in the same way. There’s no point speculating on why bands like Criminal Damage or Human Bastard aren’t on here–but my overall complaint is, there are so many great bands out there, that even allowing for differences in taste, the difficulty of getting all the tracks on time, the requirement that all songs be new and unreleased, and the peculiar vortices of taste operating on the MRR staff, there is simply no excuse for filler. For instance, there was no need for there to be FOUR bands from the Bay Area on here, especially when none of those of those songs are great, and Welcome to 1984 had zero. I had high hopes for this, and it has its moments, but I don’t think it lives up to its potential. To end this review on a high note, though, I love the essay on the back cover, which is perfectly constructed and unembarrassedly enthusiastic.
Sunday, January 07, 2007
Fucked Up "Hidden World" Review
Do you remember (hüsker dü?) the first time you heard Motorhead’s 1916 album, or Hüsker Dü’s “Books About UFOs,” or The Ramones’ “Locket Love”–and realized that this garbage noise we listen to could maybe be real music, if you squinted hard enough? I hope so. You probably also know that hundreds of bands have tried to recapture the surprising pop genius of early punk, as if, as on the cover of The Minutemen’s Project: Mersh, a band could just will themselves to write pop gems. This is why the premise of DIY pop-punk and indie-pop has always struck me as ill-conceived: “We’ll just write great songs!” Not only that, but even when done well, I find an album-length barrage of “perfect three-minute pop songs” to be an exhausting chore. To me, a great album looks more like Abbey Road, Fun House, My War or Closer than just a slew of would-be singles. Call me pretentious, but keep in mind that Vibrators-Pure Mania and Misfits-Walk Among Us are among my favorite albums. I just think that bands would be better off trying out the album format than having delusions of grandeur about being the next Ray Davies. Blessedly, I have never delved into the indie-pop/pop-punk scene, but from living in New York I have a fair impression of it, and for the most part it is like reading a bad imitation of Hemingway or Chekhov–the format (the lo-fi pop song, like the short story) really demands perfection, and anything less is all the more glaring in its insufficiency.
Hidden World is simultaneously less “pop” and more “musical” than any of Fucked Up’s prior output. Their hardcore singles were catchy as shit, every one of them a potential mix tape entry, but that is not to imply that Hidden World is some tripped-out, inaccessible post-rock mess, devoid of catchiness. But it is that rare beast, the high-concept punk record, and I’m not sure I get the concept. Seven minute long Oi songs? Lengthy odes to outsider artist Henry Darger? Elaborate fantasy album art? Well, it’s all here, and all definitely floating signifiers–which is probably exactly the concept, as “cognitive dissonance” is a major theme of lyrics and interviews. Which is to say, they’re fucking with you.
The music is fucking with you, too. How many times can you hear a riff played before it isn’t cool anymore? I have to say, this is a single album’s worth of ideas crammed into a double album. Everything.....is..... really....spaced.....out. But, like the name of the B-side of the advance single, the record is full of “Neat Parts.” I would rather have these neat parts sequenced immediately following each other, as in The Who’s “A Quick One While He’s Away,” instead of spread out over 70 minutes, but for the most part, it works. And it works precisely because Fucked Up didn’t wake up one day and say, “Let’s just take the easy way out! Fuck hardcore!” Like The Ramones’ later work, is an established band-sensibility turned inside out to do things it wasn’t meant to do (compare “Beat on the Brat” to “Bonzo Goes to Bitburg”)–this still sounds like Fucked Up...I guess. While it could no longer reasonably be called hardcore, Hidden World has all the overflowing creativity of great early punk: The Ramones, The Misfits, The Germs, Stiff Little Fingers–bands that couldn’t always pinpoint the best outlet for their musical ideas, with strange but beautiful results.
Not everything works. Nearly every song loses momentum at some point, as the churning riffs tend not to go anywhere after a while. The songs “Manqueller Man” and “Fate of Fates” didn’t quite receive the same endowment in hooks as other songs. What also has to be remembered is the extremely limited format of the group–they aren’t Metallica, after all, and their idea of a long song tends to be to meanderingly jam out on minimal difference, instead of constructing a suite of riffs.
Hüsker Dü’s Zen Arcade remains, after untold listens, a record I remain ambivalent about–too much filler, pretentious, seemingly disjunct from their previous or subsequent records while obviously some kind of transition–and Hidden World suffers from all of these problems as well, although there is no knowing where Fucked Up will go next or if it will have much to do with this album. Nonetheless, a mixed-review of this album is not to be taken as equivalent to a review of a uniformly mediocre album. Since I have no clue what the band was going for, I can’t judge it to be a success or failure on its own terms, but any record with this many “neat parts” is so far ahead of the rest of the scene–reminiscent of Poison Idea’s Feel the Darkness, or Septic Death, or Nailbiter in that regard–that it will undoubtedly be some years before it really hits us that we all own an album with this cover art:
Hidden World is simultaneously less “pop” and more “musical” than any of Fucked Up’s prior output. Their hardcore singles were catchy as shit, every one of them a potential mix tape entry, but that is not to imply that Hidden World is some tripped-out, inaccessible post-rock mess, devoid of catchiness. But it is that rare beast, the high-concept punk record, and I’m not sure I get the concept. Seven minute long Oi songs? Lengthy odes to outsider artist Henry Darger? Elaborate fantasy album art? Well, it’s all here, and all definitely floating signifiers–which is probably exactly the concept, as “cognitive dissonance” is a major theme of lyrics and interviews. Which is to say, they’re fucking with you.
The music is fucking with you, too. How many times can you hear a riff played before it isn’t cool anymore? I have to say, this is a single album’s worth of ideas crammed into a double album. Everything.....is..... really....spaced.....out. But, like the name of the B-side of the advance single, the record is full of “Neat Parts.” I would rather have these neat parts sequenced immediately following each other, as in The Who’s “A Quick One While He’s Away,” instead of spread out over 70 minutes, but for the most part, it works. And it works precisely because Fucked Up didn’t wake up one day and say, “Let’s just take the easy way out! Fuck hardcore!” Like The Ramones’ later work, is an established band-sensibility turned inside out to do things it wasn’t meant to do (compare “Beat on the Brat” to “Bonzo Goes to Bitburg”)–this still sounds like Fucked Up...I guess. While it could no longer reasonably be called hardcore, Hidden World has all the overflowing creativity of great early punk: The Ramones, The Misfits, The Germs, Stiff Little Fingers–bands that couldn’t always pinpoint the best outlet for their musical ideas, with strange but beautiful results.
Not everything works. Nearly every song loses momentum at some point, as the churning riffs tend not to go anywhere after a while. The songs “Manqueller Man” and “Fate of Fates” didn’t quite receive the same endowment in hooks as other songs. What also has to be remembered is the extremely limited format of the group–they aren’t Metallica, after all, and their idea of a long song tends to be to meanderingly jam out on minimal difference, instead of constructing a suite of riffs.
Hüsker Dü’s Zen Arcade remains, after untold listens, a record I remain ambivalent about–too much filler, pretentious, seemingly disjunct from their previous or subsequent records while obviously some kind of transition–and Hidden World suffers from all of these problems as well, although there is no knowing where Fucked Up will go next or if it will have much to do with this album. Nonetheless, a mixed-review of this album is not to be taken as equivalent to a review of a uniformly mediocre album. Since I have no clue what the band was going for, I can’t judge it to be a success or failure on its own terms, but any record with this many “neat parts” is so far ahead of the rest of the scene–reminiscent of Poison Idea’s Feel the Darkness, or Septic Death, or Nailbiter in that regard–that it will undoubtedly be some years before it really hits us that we all own an album with this cover art:
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